The SD series contains two LCD monitors in an up/down configuration separated at a 110 degree angle. A semitransparent mirror is positioned at a bisecting angle between the two monitors that, when combines with polarizing glasses, generates the stereo separation. [CGW 05/09]

It supports OpenGL- and DirectX-applications with off-the-shelf dual-DVI graphic cards, and can also easily be used in a standard 2D dual monitor configuration. More details can be found on Planar’s website.

Back in ’99 I was already impressed by stereoscopic images through Asus’ shutter glasses. Now, 10 years later, I would be really curious to see this display in action. Unfortunately, I would not use it often and long enough to justify this investment, but if it ever drops down to $500-600 I will be the first to purchase one.

The demos have all been very impressive again. Some explored different ideas than the usual animations and particle- or plasma-effects in 3D. Instead they were designed around two-dimensional, scissor-cut, flower, comic-book-like or retro-Commodore 64/Amiga-looking elements.

I’m attaching a few of my favorites below with video and a link for further details and download. Demos and intros should really be experienced in real-time. These video clips can only reflect a tiny fraction of the whole experience. A complete list of the Breakpoint 2008 entries can be found here.

Masagin by Farbrausch & Neuro [download/details]

Metamorphosis by ASD [download/details]

theBeauty by einklang.net [download/details]

Challenger Deep by Traction and Brainstorm [download/details]

64k: Invoke by Still and Conspiracy [download/details]

4k: Atrium by TBC and Loonies [download/details]

[Four kilobytes? How is that possible?]

4k: h4vok by Archee [download/details]

[Again: 4 kilobytes? I'm just speechless...]

This year’s screening in 3-D opened with Pardon My Backfire. In this 16 minute 3-D slapstick short the Three Stooges are auto mechanics who manage to capture some escaped convicts who visit their garage with a damaged fender. The 3-D gimmicks in this film were fun: the knives, tools and oil really seemed to fly into the audience. I was especially amused by how you could see the strings attached to the items or how the wire did not really move through his nose but along its side and then behind the ear–things you probably wouldn’t notice on a television screen at all. I wonder can I really rate a film like Pardon My Backfire? None of the criteria that normally help to a rating decision will work here. But it was silly but fun and had some nice 3-D gimmicks. [imdb]

Miss Sadie Thompson followed next. I didn’t know this film before, and I also didn’t know much about Rita Hayworth. I have heard the name before, but I didn’t know that she was the leading sex symbol of the era and known as “The Love Goddess”. But no wonder I was so uninformed: when I looked at the list of her filmography I noticed that I hardly know any of her movies, and that I’m very unfamiliar with the 40s era in general. I probably know no more than just a hand full of films produced in the 40s.

The film started with a lot of Marine rah-rah, over-the-top excitement about a woman coming to the island, a lot of partying, drinking, smoking, dancing, laughing and singing. I thought so typical for a lot of comedic musical films in the 50s. But it dramatically turned its direction when the religious zealot started to give her a hard time and confronted her with her past as a nightclub singer, breaking her and driving her into desperation, so much that she eventually became very internal and sublimated, vulnerable and ready to fall prey to him. Parallel to this line there also was a little love story between her and the Marine sergeant who couldn’t wait for his military time to end, get married to her and move to Australia. He was the Marine, the decent, gallant, helpful, well-spirited, well-built, excited, energetic, reasonable, the perfect match for sexy Miss Sadie, who supported her in her desire to leave her past behind and the struggle with the moralizer who tried to ruin her plans to move to a different place and work a different job.

This film in many ways fit to the movie-spirit of its time and ended with a happy end, but I was surprised by some of the directions this film took. I thought some of it was quite daring and on the edge of what must have been acceptable at the time in terms of sex or sexiness, moral standards and religion. I read that her character was originally a prostitute and changed to a nightclub singer to conform with the production code of this era. The morally corrupt and sadistic reverend was changed into an unaffiliated religious zealot. Even with the changes to conform with censorship dictates the film was called “filthy, rotten, lewd, immoral, just a plain raw dirty picture” and that it should be banned. It was actually banned by several state censorship boards. I can hardly imagine how difficult it must have been to deal with censors.

This film turned out to be more interesting than I expected it to be. It was in 3-D but not at all as strong and gimmicky as other 3-D movies. Which I think was good, because extensive gimmicks just would have subtracted from the story’s tone and flow. [imdb]

A quarantine strands Sadie (Rita Hayworth) on an exotic island with a love-sick Marine and a self-righteous religious zealot. While one man has his mind on romance, the other has his suspicions about Sadie.

Miss Sadie Thompson was released as a 3-D film in 1953, but with declining interest in the format at the time, the 3-D version was pulled off screens after two weeks and the title was re-released as a “flat” movie — making this 2008 screening a rare opportunity to see the film projected in its original, eye-popping format! The film survived censorship and went on to be one of the highest-grossing films that year, receiving an Oscar nomination for the song, “Blue Pacific Blues. (Skizz Cyzyk)” (from the filmfest-guide)

For those who haven’t heard anything about demos and its scene yet, here is a brief history: It all started in the old days of home computers like Commodore 64 or Amiga, back when we used to share floppy disks and cassette tapes with our favorite games. Just like today, companies tried to stop people from sharing their favorites and invented one clever copy protection method after another. But soon somebody would find a way to crack it, proudly add a little signature to the cracked game and share it with his friends. Eventually people got together in groups and started to create breathtaking animated intros with superb music. It not only was a way to make themselves known, greet friends and show off their artistic or coding skills, it sometimes also sweetened the long time some games would take to load, especially from cassette tapes. And sometimes the animated intro would even become more impressive than the game itself.

Eventually groups started to compete against each other. Their little works of coding-art soon attracted a lot of fans, and the demo-parties were born. I was a huge fan myself…the old intros inspired me to learn assembly language on the Commodore 64, and write my first programs with a graphical user interface and a mouse-pointer you could control with the joystick. My old C64 applications were in no way as impressive as what the demo-groups produced, but they were what fired my interest in programming early on and became quite a passion in my early pc-days.

For many years the demo-scene’s preferred platforms were C64 and Amiga computers and it took much longer to find its way into the ibm-pc arena. Although personal computers had a much faster CPU and more memory available than a C64, it just wasn’t the right platform for demos. The hardware wasn’t suited for extensive and fast animations with graphics and sound. The sound cards for office computers were poor and people often had monochrome monitors before the first small color displays became affordable. There also was a gap between the average office user and the gaming-community.

This changed later when Soundblaster and especially the Gravis Ultrasound added superior sound to the old office computer. Sound, better and more colorful graphics paved the way for games, demos and music-software on the ibm-platform. And with better hardware the user-community began to merge and drive the multimedia capacities forward.

One popular way to create music on the ibm-computer actually originated from the Amiga world: The MOD sound format was a bit of a mix between midi-files and wave-audio. It allowed you to define wave-samples and play them as instruments in a tracker-table. These files were perfect for demo-soundtracks because they were almost as small as midi, but sounded as great as fully recorded wave-tracks. The Finland based demo-group Future Crew created Scream Tracker, at that time one of the best tools to create MOD and S3M files with up to 32 channels.

The Future Crew was probably the most prominent demo group in the early 90s. What they created with their demos Unreal and Second Reality just blew me away. Every year, Future Crew and other demo groups presented their demos at international competitions like the Assembly in Finland, The Party in Denmark and other events around. The competitions took place in several disciplines: C64, Amiga or PC, music, graphics/art, 4k intros, 64k intros and larger sized demos. The goal was and is simple: To push the limits and achieve the most impressive results possible with the hardware available. While limits are not so much given with the existing hardware nowadays, the files have to be as small as possible. But even today, hardware can matter on devices like cell-phones or Gameboy Advance.

To save space, graphics, effects and animations are not rendered into huge video-files—they are calculated live during runtime. Demos are a wonderful artistic mix of coding skill, algorithms, mathematics, physics , and 3d-graphic principles on the one side, and art, story, drama, cinematography, choreography, lights, music and sound effects on the other. They show what a computer is really capable of—something that often falls into oblivion after days of word processing, web-browsing or dealing with business applications.

After several years of working real jobs, studying, web and the “serious” code I lost touch with the demo-scene and I had no idea that it indeed continued to live on and evolve in all these years. Perhaps I didn’t think they could become even more impressive than back in the 90s. How wrong I was…

When I read that article yesterday I got curious and wanted to see what the demo scene is like today. I downloaded a few demos, and… When I started the first demo I got goosebumps all over and had tears in my eyes. What I saw there was truly unbelievable… really breathtaking! I can’t believe my old heart can still get as excited as 15 years ago. I think I have to start programming for fun again!

The following are a few examples of what they are like today. I’m not sure if this is your cup of tea, or if there are better demos out there, but I’m very impressed and think they deserve all respect.

fr-041: debris, by farbrausch, download 177k
What you get to see and hear for only 177 kilobyte is just unbelievable. It doesn’t surprise me it made the first place in the pc-demo category. The camera work including the hand-camera effects are beautiful, the scenery and animation very well done. I really liked the sound, too. There are just a few minor things that I felt offered room for improvement, but hey, it’s only 177k! It’s smaller than this blog-post!

Fairytale, by Traction and Brainstorm, download 8,620k
This is much larger than debris above, but not any less impressive. It is an extremely beautiful demo with a great score that reminded me a bit of Porcupine Tree. I loved the aesthetics, animation and play with lights and curves, all very fluent and harmonic. Brilliant!

Above, by lkcc and Bauknecht, download 9,282k
Aithein, by mfx, download 16,905kb
I love the vintage and organic look, feel and sound of this demo. It was a bit of a Boards of Canada experience. Very nice!

Threespace, by Rebels, download 591kb (64k pc-intro and demos for mac & linux)

The Prophecy – Project Nemesis by Conspiracy, download 86kb
I saved the best for last and humbly bow before The Prophecy…I cannot believe that this demo is really only 64k! Armageddon filmed in 65,024 bytes? It is pure magic. How did they do it? I have done a bit of programming in the past, in two or three dimensions, with audio, in different languages, but this exceeds my wildest imagination. Landscapes, objects, buildings, music, animation, choreography, special effects, textures, credits…all this coded into a single file of 64k? I really would love to see a “making-of”. Check out the screenshots or watch the video clip below, or even better: download and start the intro. The live-demos look much better than youtube or google-videos.

With Edmond O’Brien, Audrey Totter, Ted de Corsia, Horace MacMahon, Nick Dennis, Dayton Lummis, Dan Riso, Shepard Menken, John Harmon, Ruth Warren

Edmond O’Brien stars as a former gangster who undergoes experimental brain surgery in hopes of curing his criminal tendencies and wiping out all memory of his past misdeeds. Unfortunately, his old gang is interested in recovering one particular forgotten memory – the location of their stashed loot – and they’ll stop at nothing to get it. A high stakes game of cat-and-mouse ensues, eventually ending up in an amusement park and climaxing with the film’s famous roller coaster scene.” (from the filmfest-guide)

One must-see highlight of the film festival we wouldn’t want to miss is the 3-D movie each year. When do you ever get to see a movie in 3-D? In the past few years we watched films like The Mad Magician, Gorilla At Large and House of Wax. This year’s 3-D movie pick was 1953’s Man In the Dark by Lew Landers and presented by the festival’s resident expert on 3-D movies Chris Kaltenbach, who also brought the previous years’ 3-D choices to the festival.

Man In The Dark is described as the first 3-D feature to use a production method in which the film was shot flat first, then projected behind foreground scenery props and re-filmed in 3-D so that only the props would jump off the screen. I thought this really decreased the quality of the 3-D effects and environment if I recall the experience I had with House of Wax or the Mad Magician before. Some effects like the scalpels used in the operation appeared way too busy or strong to be watched from the first rows, and other moments like the roof-top race deserved a much better use of the 3-D effect.

No doubt, it definitely was a pleasure to watch, in a 50s trashy classic sort of way.