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The Eyecare Trust has revealed that 3D films could be causing headaches for 12 per cent of the British population due to poor binocular vision.

While many have raved about 3D blockbuster hits Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, The Eyecare trust has said that more than one in 10 of us "has a visual impairment that means our brains are unable to correctly process the individual images that are transmitted to it via our left and right eyes.

"This leads to an inconsistency in viewing the three spatial dimensions (height, width and depth) required to enjoy 3D films in all their glory," its website said.

Treatment

The vision impairment can lead to reduced reading ability and increased screen fatigue when watching TV for long periods of time.

Poor binocular vision can be easily detected during an eye examination, and a new pair of glasses or vision therapy can prevent the 3D-induced headaches.

These findings could be causing their own headache for game publisher Ubisoft, who expect a 3D TV in every living room in three years and half of all games produced to be 3D-ready.

Digital entertainment has successfully stormed, conquered and had its way with our homes and is currently sat in the sofa with its feet up, smoking our cigars and drinking our whisky (we only keep the Scottish stuff).

From Freeview to DAB radio; even the most innocuous home devices have turned digital, but the PC remains the most versatile way of enjoying all forms of media. But how's this an excuse for every major media player to bolt on an internet store?

If you drop a music file on a player, it should play it. Not tag, catalogue, download album art and ask twenty questions about it. But that's the state of play we have, with many media players acting more like a strict librarian than anything else. As the old adage goes: use the right tool for the right job.

We like and use Windows Media Player, but we'd prefer something lighter and honed into our perfect player. It doesn't help when the 'big two' media-player moguls only want to support their own audio and video formats.

• The best performing media player for 2010

There's a gaggle of formats out there: some are there for legacy reasons; a few are proprietary ones thrust upon the world by their corporate evangelists; and others are community developed to circumvent licensing issues.

We're not for a second going to contemplate considering which one is best, but instead focus on the best ways of being able to play them all as easily as possible. Along the way you can identify issues when they occur and eliminate those that get between you and your entertainment.

It's a complicated area which, to be fair, the corporate players keep as simple as possible, while the open source solutions open it up to the harsh light of day. But whichever option you chose there are free ways to perfect your media enjoyment.

You can start with this question: what do you want from a media player? The most obvious answer is in the question itself; we want an application that plays all the media that we own.

It seems simple enough, so why have we ended up with gargantuan applications, such as iTunes that come with entire internet stores bolted on? What's the point of 'features' such as Home Share that actually limits and restricts how you share files over your home network, support for hardware you don't own, along with categories and applications you'll never want or use?

To its credit iTunes is a great media library and it's obviously essential for iPod and iPhone users, but it's wrapped inside a 90MB beast of an application. If only the media library section could be spun out on its own, then it would be the perfect solution. In fact, iPod and iPhone users might want to look up www.i-funbox.com and try it out as an alternative way to manage your files and media.

Similar allegations can be levelled at Windows Media Player, though we find its skinned mode to, at least, be happily minimalistic and all you need to do is just drag a file to its window and have it played.

Keep it simple

But it's this unnecessary feature-creep that plagues these big-two media players.

Right at the other end of the spectrum take Foobar2000, available for free from foobar2000.org. This is a lightweight, utterly configurable audio player that's only designed to play audio files. Frankly we've fallen in love with it, as it lets us relive our simpler WinAmp days, when media players were media players.

The modular design of this freeware player is so flexible it's going to be possible to have it extended beyond all recognition.

One of the key features of foobar2000 is that the interface is totally configurable, it's possible to have the available modules positioned and interact any way you like.

To recreate a basic WinAmp playlist choose View > Layout > Enable Layout Editing Mode. Right-click each element and choose 'Cut' to remove it, you may need to choose View > Layout > Cut on certain empty elements.

Once you're left with a blank container, click this and Choose 'Tabs'. Click inside the blank tab container and choose 'Playlist View', in the other two place 'Album List' and 'Album Art Viewer'. Rename the tabs and use the View > Layout menu to disable the editing mode.

It natively supports all the normal and abnormal audio formats you could want, as well as a host of more exotic options, such as AC3, ALAC and ADPCM. This is all thanks to the flexible component system, which can also add features such as Last.fm scrobble support and UPnP server features; making it as comprehensive as you want it to be.

Of course, there is WinAmp, not so much the full version but we'd recommend the Lite edition, which is hidden away towards the bottom of the download page. Make sure you untick all the 'extras' that are offered during the installation.

Winamp Lite retains the excellent core layout plus the extendable skin, DSP and visualisation system than WinAmp has always offered without the frivolous extras.

Audio is one thing, but it's in the area of video where things start to get messy. This is largely because a video file consists not only of an audio stream but a video stream.

How these two streams are packaged can be thought of as the file's format. To decode this you need the correct audio and video codec – that's coder-decoder – this can be a system-wide one or one that's internal to the player. We'll come back to codecs later on, at this point we just need to know they exist. But decoding the audio and video streams is just the beginning.

The audio has to be piped from your PC's sound card to your speakers system via your connection of choice. This could be anything from a mono-speaker through to eight channels of high-definition audio, including low-frequency effects for subwoofers via mini-jacks, HDMI, optical or S/PDIF connections. Additionally, you may want to apply normalisation, virtual surround and equaliser effects.

Equally, the video stream once decoded needs to be scaled to the correct size, colour corrected, have any post-processing applied to remove blocking artefacts and then have any subtitles added over the image. That's a lot of stuff to handle and if you've had a poke around iTunes or Windows Media Player you might have noticed there are not a lot of options in regards to any of these.

That's where two of our favourite media players come into play. Opinion is divided as to which is best, but there's no doubt you'll love either VLC from videolan.org or Media Player Classic Home Cinema from mpc-hc.sourceforge.net.

If we got into a stand-up shouting match we'd probably end up siding with VLC as it's better supported, but Media Player Classic does have a heap of advanced output options. Both of these are open source projects that provide streamlined media players with internal codecs that support the majority of audio and video file formats.

Alongside this basic feature-set, they also offer advanced playback options that can enable you to get more from your system; both in terms of image and audio quality, but also speed. This latter point can be invaluable if you're trying to play hi-def video on a low-power system or laptop.

Single core processors struggle and any help they can get is a real boon, but again we'll cover ways you can tackle this as we go along. At their most basic, both enable you to just drag files to them and play.

Unlike Windows Media Player they also support the obvious universal pause/play shortcut of pressing the [Space bar] rather than [Ctrl]+[P].

VLC really is the 'Wash & Go' option, it'll handle pretty much anything you throw at it, even damaged, partly completed or locked files.

Tweak it

When it comes to playback options it's hard to beat Media Player Classic. Select View > Options to see the true horror of everything that's available. The key elements to improving playback can be found under Playback > Output and Internal Filters > Audio Switcher.

The choice of 'Renderer under Output' influences performance, though it's a complex issue depending on the OS you're running and the format of the video you're playing. Technically, 'Overlay Mixer' is the fastest, however it'll force Vista and Win7 to use compatibility mode as it requires a 2D overlay.

We've found 'WMR9 (renderless)' to offer the best compatibility with slightly poorer performance. With Vista onwards you can use the 'EVR Custom Pres' option – your graphics card and drivers will need to be up to date to avoid issues – this supports hardware acceleration and enables you to select an enhanced resizer such as 'Bicubic' to ensure you get the best upscaling.

For audio the Audio Switcher provides a way to remap the internal channels to your external speakers. If you find your rear speakers have their channels the wrong way around, then this provides an easy way to switch the output without having to rewire anything.

Select the 'Enable Custom Channel Mapping' and select the correct number of channels. You then select which channels are outputted to which speakers. Additionally, Media Player Classic offers the ability to apply post processing to the video image, using the graphic card's shader-based filter operations. These will only work when the renderer is using a 3D surface, such as one of the VMR renderless or EVR options. Select Play > Shaders to see a full list.

On the face of it you can only apply a single one at a time. However, select the 'Combine Shaders…' option and it'll enable you to do just that. The Sharpen options can be tempting for SD content but you may find them a little harsh.

Older versions of Media Player Classic had a bug that caused blocking on red areas, the YV12 Chroma shader was a work around for this. Also certain display devices – mainly TVs and projectors – are optimised for an RGB range of 16 to 235. If you find your blacks are washed out try one of these to compress the output colour range.

Format confusion

Let's attempt an impossible job: make codecs sound something approaching interesting. For any media player to successfully play audio or video data they either need the correct internal or external codec.

The big issue is that there are so many different types available and it's not always clear which codec a file actually requires; more so for video than audio. When it comes to identifying the type of codec used, we recommend MediaInfo.

This is a longstanding media-file analyser that does a great job of spotting the format of your media. Open a file with it and it'll produce a lot of technical information about the file. Largely this information is going to state which audio codecs have been found, such as MP1-3, AC3, DTS, AAC or LPCM. There are also video codecs, such as MPEG-2, DivX, Xvid, h.264, x.264, MPEG-4, WMV and FLV.

To confuse matters you also have container formats such as AVI, OGM, MKV, MP4, FLV and TS. These effectively contain one or more video and audio streams potentially alongside multiple subtitles. If you had to individually support all of these it'd be a nightmare.

The best one-stop solution is to use a well-known codec pack. If this is the option you want to pursue, then we would recommend CCCP. This uses a collection of open source codecs and utilities to solve if not quite all, then most of your playback problems.

To start with it's based around Media Player Classic and includes all the major audio and video codecs required, along with container formats. It does this through the open source program, ffdshow which is an advanced audio and video decoder.

Along with this is a Haali 'media splitter' that takes container formats, such as MKV and splits the separate audio, video and subtitle streams off. Finally, there's VSFilter, which is an advanced subtitling program.

Once installed it's worth taking time to look at the options from each configuration program, stored in the Start > Programs folder > Combined Community Codec Pack. This single pack will solve 90 per cent of your playback issues in one fell swoop.

One thing it can't help with though is poor processor power. Single-core processors really struggle with HD material; you can try tweaking, but ultimately you need an optimised codec.

If you're prepared to pay $13 (£8) then we highly recommend CoreAVC from CoreCodec, which can even play HD video on Atom-based netbooks. HD snobs will say technically it does this by cutting corners on the decoding, but you'll never notice. The other brilliant feature for CoreAVC is that it supports Nvidia CUDA, so you'll get acceleration from compatible graphics cards on top.

We should also touch upon subtitles. We've already mentioned these can be embedded within a container file such as an MKV. Depending on which player you use, then either the player itself – Media Player Classic, for example – will handle the rendering of the subtitles or an external decoder will be thrown into action.

It's fine when subtitles are embedded, but if you need your own, then these come in a variety of formats: SRT, UTF, IDX or SUB. Sites like www.opensubtitles.org try to catalogue these files. When you are using external subtitles put them in the same folder and name them the same as the video file. An external file will overrule an internal one.

To get subtitles working in ffdshow, access its Properties either from the Start menu or when its icon is displayed in the Notification Area, and locate the Subtitles section. Make sure the 'Heuristic' search option is ticked, as this will intelligently identify external subtitle files, usually in the same folder. The Text and Font section enable you to position and customise the look of the subtitles.

The often used alternative is DirectVobSub, which is the large green arrow that appears in the Notification Area. This requires almost no setting up, but you may want to tweak the font size and positioning.

A censoring service which cuts out swearing and nudity from DVDs is to be released in the UK later this year.

ClearPlay is already around in the US, where it offers a smut filtration tool for those who are horrified at the site of nude people or the sound of the 'f' word.

Currently there is only one DVD player out which supports ClearPlay – this is the ClearPlay 747HD.

The DVD player currently only plays Region 1 discs, but this is set to change with a Region 2 version available before the year is out.

To keep it up to date, there's a database of dirt available online which houses information about when adult content appears. Once you load this information into the DVD via USB, the player then "seamlessly skips and mutes content based on 12 categories that you can set".

It's not just DVD content that ClearPlay has its eyes on, with the company noting that it would like to expand into Blu-ray and IPTV.

Shield the children

"ClearPlay has an innovative system for enabling parents to shield their children from what they consider to be inappropriate content in the home," said Director General Lavinia Carey in a statement.

"This may be on titles classified for their age but which might feature language or scenes that they'd rather their children didn't see.

"It may also allow them to watch age restricted video with younger children whose content is generally suitable to view but again there may be moments of stronger content."

According to the BVA (British Video Association) it has no problems with the way ClearPlay edits a movie as the actual DVD isn't being touched. It's the metadata ClearPlay delivers which tells the player to skip content or mute the sound.

With that in mind, TechRadar has put its dev hat on and is trying to come up with a ClearPlay rival, going by the name of DirtyFunPlay, which edits all the wholesome elements of a movie and turns them into filth.

You heard it here first.

A coalition has been formed by Indian Studios and the MPAA, which hopes to stamp out DVD piracy in India.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, piracy cost the movie industry in India $959 million in 2008 – making it one of the worst countries in the world for creating DVD knock-offs.

Speaking about the coalition, MPAA chairman Dan Glickman said: "Free is great and everybody likes things for free. [But] in a civilised society, we need to pay for products and services.

"I believe that as an industry, if we offer people products at reasonable prices in a hassle free manner, people will not steal."

Glickman also noted that piracy was costing the industry jobs, saying: "The menace of copyright theft jeopardises a movie's ability to make money – if at all.

"This affects the level of investment available for new films and the ability to create new jobs for workers throughout the country,"

Non-bailable offence

Another person vocal in India's anti-piracy plight is Bollywood film-maker Yash Chopra, who said about the problems: "The Indian film industry loses millions of dollars every year due to piracy. India is also among the top 10 countries in the world when it comes to this crime.

"We need government support to implement stricter rules to prevent people from going to watch movies in cinemas with camcorders for copying purposes. If someone is caught, it should be a non-bailable offence."

We're hoping that the alliance will solve the piracy problem by challenging the pirates to a massive Bollywood dance-off. But, for some reason, it looks like the courts and police will more likely deal with the problem.

Although Virgin Media are remaining coy on the details of its forthcoming next-generation TiVo-enabled boxes, there are plenty of assumptions that can be made.

With the partnership signed and sealed and development well underway on an interface that brings the Virgin Media hardware and the TiVo user experience together, what can you expect to find on the next-generation cable set-top boxes?

1. Recommendation and automatic record engine

Central to everything that has made TiVo such a dominant force in US PVRs is the much-vaunted recommendation engine. Users grade the kind of programmes that they watch, giving it up to three thumbs up or down, and TiVo's system then uses the recommendation to find and record the kinds of programmes that you like.

On top of this, TiVo uses the (anonymised) information from all of its user base to work out what people who watch the same kinds of shows as you are watching to make even more guesses on your behalf.

The upshot is that your PVR will always be full of programs that you may (or may not) like to watch based on your viewing preferences.

But how will TiVo recommendations work on boxes without a PVR? This is something that Virgin Media is working hard to solve – but the recommendations can apply equally to available Video on Demand (VOD) meaning that things like BBC iPlayer content, catch-up TV and, potentially, TV Choice on Demand will be graded and provided as TiVo recommendations.

Plus, expect to see TiVo recommending shows you might like to watch on the linear channels, even if it cannot record them for you.

2. 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon

Another useful addition to TiVo that is likely to appear in Virgin Media's user interface (UI) is functionality that allows you to see the cast of any given show and then what other shows and movies they appear in.

So, for instance, should you be watching Kiefer Sutherland in 24 and want to see if any of his extensive range of movies are being shown elsewhere in the listings (or available on VOD of course) then you can. You can also then surf onto his co-stars in those films and see what TV and film they are appearing in that's available and so on.

3. Context specific recommendations

Another offshoot of the recommendation engine is that when they are combined with some content hand-picked by an editorial team and the cast and crew information you can have a dynamic feed of relevant content that actually sits nicely with whatever it is you are looking at.

So, if you happen to be looking for a movie starring a particular actor, you could well get recommendations on the page that point to other work by some of the cast, other movies of the same type and movies that people who watched that film have also watched.

4. Collections

For those who have flicked through some of the TV Choice on Demand and film VOD menus in the current Sky+ box you will have some idea of what to expect from collections. Essentially these are groups of related pieces of content that you may want to watch.

However, Collections from TiVo takes that to the next level, providing some timely groups of programmes and other longer form content. So, for instance, you could have a Collection of romantic movies that appears around Valentine's Day, or a grouping of England's World Cup football matches but you could equally more static content like Total Film's top 10 movies of all time.

5. Three tuners

In come ways the Virgin Media TiVo box may be better than the TiVo boxes on sale in the US and one of those ways will be in the amount of tuners. Currently TiVo (and Sky+) offers dual tuners – you can record two things but you then can't watch any other channel live unless it is one that you are recording on.

One of the key selling points of V+ is that it has three tuners – allowing dual record and a live third channel – and we'd put our mortgage on Virgin Media keeping the three tuner approach for its next generation.

6. HD for all

There's been no announcement but if we had a bottom dollar then we'd be ready to bet it on that next generation of all V boxes being HD enabled.

Currently all V+ boxes can run HD content and there's no added subscription, but we expect more HD functionality to be rolled out sooner rather than later, bearing in mind that Freeview HD is beginning to roll out to the masses and Sky's HD strategy is clearly working.

7. Enhanced search and 8. Curation

Perhaps the most vital functionality in the new TiVo boxes is the use of search. The word being used all over the place is 'curation' meaning the way in which the masses of content are brought together and displayed in a way which is relevant to the user and search is central to that.

TiVo's principle is that if you are looking for a TV show then the channel, type or access to that programme is of secondary interest. If you are looking for the latest episode of Lost, for example, then you should be given all options – VOD or linear – or be told when the episode is actually going to be available.

So therefore search is of huge importance – and TiVo's search orders things by popularity; start typing and just like the awesome bar in Firefox, or auto suggest in Bing and Google, the option start to narrow down with the most popular choices appearing first be it actor or show.

When you arrive at the show or actor the way in which the results are displayed are important. To continue with our example going to the Lost page will bring up show information, cast, an episode guide and, crucially, when (and where) you can watch or record them.

Why is this cool? Because you don't need to trawl through the listings looking for a programme – you can just find all the content from a series (or actor) in one place.

9. Internet content

Another thing that features for each show on the TiVo box is selected internet content for each programme or actor. Essentially a search is run for content on YouTube appending the name of the show and the world TV – not exactly sophisticated but potentially useful.

Although VM might well not go exactly down this route – the principle of using internet data to boost TV watching is clear, and some kind of YouTube access is likely to be enhanced with other routes to web content.

10. More graphics, less text

Last but not least, Virgin Media's TiVo boxes will almost certainly boast a much more visual user experience. The current text-heavy menu systems are a million miles away from the graphical TiVo UI and integrating things like movie posters and screenshots really make using it significantly nicer.

Of course, the corporate colours are likely to feature heavily and it remains to be seen whether the ever-present discovery bar at the top of the screen will be ported across in all its graphical glory, but expect a more dynamic, more graphical and friendlier experience.

11. Networked multi-room

One of TiVo's most popular features is its networked boxes – allowing you to access the recordings you made in your living room from your second box in the bedroom or vice versa.

It certainly isn't much of a reach to suggest that Virgin media will be keen to bring this feature to its boxes, especially because 'upselling' – convincing people that they shouldn't just get the basic packages but should add a V+ box or multi-room – is a great way of increasing revenues, and this is a great reason to splash out a little more for a nice bit of functionality.

12. Mobile content

This remains the feature that is both the most desirable for consumers and thorniest for Virgin Media. Imagine being able to simply convert and send your content to your mobile phone or laptop so that you can keep up with your television wherever you are.

It's obviously a powerful concept, and yet content providers – ie, the people who make the TV programmes or films – remain worried that being able to copy to a mobile device could impact on their DVD sales.

Can the problem be solved? Almost certainly. But it remains to be seen if we will get the TiVo mobile functionality in the Virgin box

Back in 1996, James Cameron announced that he would be creating a film called Avatar, a science-fiction epic that would feature photo-realistic, computer-generated characters.

He had a treatment for the film, which already defined many things, including the Na'vi – a primitive alien race standing ten feet tall with shining blue skin, living in harmony with their jungle-covered planet Pandora.

Soon after, though, Avatar had to be shelved as the technology of the time could not satisfy the creative desires of the director.

Fast-forward to October 2009: Dan Lemmon, FX supervisor and Andy Jones, animation director at Weta Digital have about two weeks left of visual effects production for Avatar. The near-900 strong crew spanned across six locations are practically working around the clock to achieve what was deemed impossible a decade earlier.

Weta Digital, the New Zealand studio responsible for the groundbreaking visual effects in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong, is taking VFX to a new level of creative and technological excellence.

For Avatar, the studio has created over 1,800 stereoscopic, photo-realistic visual effects shots, many of them of the Na'vi as 'hero' characters. In addition to digital characters and environments are the machines, vehicles, equipment and everything else that help blur the line between imagination and reality.

"We're not just talking about the environment, but the creatures, the machines and the vehicles that people use to get around. The whole world is unique and because of the way James Cameron approaches things, everything seems functional and believable. Compared to other sci-fi fantasy genre films there's a certain level of realism just in the design that makes it very believable," says VFX supervisor Dan Lemmon.

Realising the Na'vi

Over a decade ago, Cameron had already figured out what he wanted the Na'vi to look like. "Back then, it was clear that they were going to be blue, tall, have tails and be somewhat feline-like," says Lemmon.

"We set out to make the Na'vi as realistic as possible. To do that we needed key departments to be firing on all cylinders," says animation director Andy Jones. "From facial and body rigging, motion capture, to animation, and shading and rendering – all these departments reached a synergy to bring these performances to the screen."

Lemmon adds, "We used a lot of photographs and scans of the actors and tried to incorporate the details of the physical actors into the digital characters – for both the Na'vi and humans. There are some characters like Jake, who's played by Sam Worthington, where there's both an Avatar double and a digital double.

"There's a lot of data that we captured through digital scanning and Lightstage capture. In addition, we did a lot of extra texture and shader work to make sure all that detail went into the final renders."

A new muscle system

For animating the digital characters in Avatar, Weta Digital had to develop some key technologies that would simulate realism as accurately as possible. Previously, Weta used relatively simplified muscle-simulation systems to generalise how muscles deformed a character's skin.

With Avatar, CG supervisor Simon Clutterbuck led the team to create a more accurate skeletal and muscle-simulation system. "It's quite cool now. Muscles intercollide, preserve their volume and are anatomically correct," says Lemmon.

"There are tissue layers, tendon sheets and all the critical parts of how a muscle system works. It gives a much more realistic starting point for creating believable creature deformations such as all the sliding under the skin and the dynamics of flesh as it moves."

For the Na'vi to be believable, realistic facial animation was crucial. The Na'vi experience a wide range of emotions and the facial animation had to convey these in a realistic way, or potentially fall into the 'Uncanny Valley.'

Weta used a variety of techniques to get the facial animation to a realistic state. First of all was facial motion capture. Using a high-definition video camera attached to the face of an actor and markers on the face, Weta's in-house software was able to map out which muscles in the face were firing.

The underlying technology is based on Paul Eckman and Wallace Friesen's Facial Action Coding System (FACS). By creating a map of muscle firings, Weta was able to retarget the motion data onto faces that don't match directly – in this instance, the Na'vi.

"We started doing this when we were working on King Kong," says Lemmon. "Andy Serkis was playing Kong and his facial anatomy is fairly different from a gorilla's. By capturing the muscle firings, we were able to retarget the motions back onto an animal with different anatomy and topology. We were looking to do essentially the same thing with the Na'vi but in a more sophisticated way."

"This system allowed us to generate a lot of detail in the motion of the faces," Jones adds. "Jim shot a ton of HD reference of his actors and that ended up being the saving grace for the animation process. Once the facial solve came out of motion capture, we would submit side-by-side renders of the real actor and his avatar/Na'vi counterpart, and tweak and adjust the facial animation to get every last nuance into the performance."

Advanced facial rigs

In order to create and retain the detail in the faces, Weta upped the ante in facial rig complexity and mesh resolution. "The facial rigs are by far the most advanced I have ever worked with," proclaims Jones.

LIFELIKE: Facial performance capture was used to recreate the actor's every nuance

"Jeff Unay and his team really pushed the envelope on these characters, working with extremely high-resolution meshes to sculpt in details and wrinkles that would have normally been placed in displacement maps.

"With the wrinkles in the model, he could control the motion of them so that the skin actually squashes together and then forms the wrinkle, instead of it just dissolving on and off like a displacement."

Jones also gives credit to the advances in hardware for making this possible. "In terms of motion, the technology that has helped us the most was the computer processing and graphics card speeds. A facial rig with this many polys could not have been attempted five years ago. The slow speeds would have made it impossible to animate," he says.

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To learn more about the cutting-edge systems Weta Digital and James Cameron developed to realise this sci-fi blockbuster, and to find out how Avatar was made stereoscopic, pick up issue 125 of 3D World magazine , on sale now.