Anyone ever hear of a 3d projection device being developed by sega for the genesis? A user at slashdot.org posted this comment-- "At my last job at SEGA, my lab was in charge of coming up with many different and pioneering ideas for new ways to play video games, many of which, for one reason or another, never made it to market. One of those was HOLO-GENESIS. It was a 3-D laser holographic projection device for the MegaDrive/geneis. It could have displayed 3-D rendered images, in full-color, in real-time, using a system of 3 red/green/blue lasers, and a finely-meshed micro-faceted surface which gave a pseudo 3-D effect based on carefully utilized light diffraction effects, a la printed holograms. It was slated to come out in mid-1995, but at the time, we couldn't get a acceptable frame rate (3-D graphics accelerator hardware was still very primitive and expensive, the province of SGI workstations and arcade machines), so we decided to not commercialize it at the time. In any case, I must say, this is a very interesting announcement, and I must congratulate IBM for further and seemingly admirable work on bringing such technology to the market. Hopefully they can continue to lower the price point and make it adopted wider." He talks like they actually had a working model at one point, though it seems it was never to the point of a semi-final retail proto. He's probably just full of it, but I thought I would post here and see if anyone had heard anything similar. Here is the link to the story he commented onhttp://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/12/148207&threshold=1&tid=136&tid=129
Samir Gupta is a well known troll. He claims to have worked in pretty much every video game company in the world, and tells complete bollocks stories. See here: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl...&tid=97&tid=95&tid=17&mode=thread&cid=6966071 Some believe him, others know he is a troll
Don't feed the trolls... You only have to look at the spec sheet of the genesis to see that it had trouble if there were too many sprites on the screen... it would have exploded if you tried to render 3d in any useable form. Of course the date is funny too, because any sega internal work by that point would have probably been towards the sega CD/32X or most likely the Saturn.
Amusing proof of your theory (of the MD being ill-equipped for 3D, to put it mildly) can be seen in Steel Talons or LHX... or how about the system's Brazil-only Duke Nukem 3D port
heh. read some in that slashdot link and found this: http://groups.google.com/group/rec....?lnk=st&q=samir-gupta&rnum=3#f62208575a7b416d where "Dr Samir Gupta" says that he is "head of SEGA's New Technology research department" and then he goes on saying that he is developing the "SMELL-O-VISION", "a innovative accessory which connects to the modem port of your SEGA Genesis system! This device can synthesize any smell known to mankind" this thing should have come out in 95, he also add that around the same time will they also release this "HOLO-GENESIS". ^_^;; belive him if you want to, I don't
This reminds me of an arcade machine I played many years ago (10+) that had a circular table on which 2d holograms (the kind where no matter which way your looking at them they are the same image) were projected. I think it was made by sega, but its been a long time. All I remember outside that is it was a fighting game with realy bad response times (although it was so neat I kept playing anyway).
Anything, anybody posts on slashdot, when commenting on a story, you should take with a grain of salt.
Yeah, I remember that. Time Traveller was one game I played on this particular arcade machine and I believe there were 2 other games released for it at some point. It was cool, but like any other LaserDisc/full motion video game of the era it got repetitive and predictable.
There were only two. Time Traveler http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?letter=T&game_id=10124 Holosseum http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?letter=H&game_id=8132
Holosseum was fun, but very limited. It had these three blocks of wood, but the characters never went behind or ran around them. Then I found out years later it was just a mirror trick, and the holographic aspect was complete bullshit. Oh well.
Yeah, I remeber Time Traveler. The effect was pretty cool looking though (even thoughit was just a trick.) I wonder why they never made any more games like that.
Time Traveler used some sort of LD system like Dragon's Lair, but Holosseum just used a standard System 32 board and game on a ROM, so obviously any system could drive this holographic display that Sega had, including a Genesis, though I'm sure Sega never would have considered making a consumer version of the display. By the way, Time Traveler was released as one of those DVD games that you can play in any DVD player. I happened on it a few years ago used an picked it up. You think the game was boring in the arcades? Imagine it in strictly 2D without even the hologram gimmic to fall back on. It's awful. It does have a 3D mode, though actually, complete with red and blue paper glasses. I actually haven't ever tried that. The game is really sort of unplayable, much more so than stuff like Dragon's Lair or Night Trap. ...word is bondage...
