Stereoscopic Glasses from Nvidia
Some of you might remember way back in the day when you could get the 3D VR glasses, like the ones packaged with a TNT2 Ultra from ASUS. They were pretty neat for their time, but by no means very good. They were troublesome to get working properly and game support was pretty flaky as well. Hence why they pretty much disappeared from the market shortly after. Good try right?
Well Nvidia is bringing this whole idea back this year, hopefully with a much better experience for the user. Quoting and interview that Maximum PC recently had with Nvidia, we have the following direct response:
“The Nvidia GeForce Stereoscopic 3D driver works at the lowest level by taking 3D game data and rendering each scene twice – once for the left eye and once for the right eye. Each eye image is offset from each other for the correct viewing. The GPU then sends this data to a 3D Ready display. These displays show the left eye view for even frames (0,2,4,etc) and the right eye view for odd frames (1,3,5,etc). Nvidia 3D glasses then synchronize back to the 3D Ready display and present slightly different images to each eye resulting in the illusion of depth and an incredibly immersive experience for games.”
This new stereoscopic technology will be better experienced on displays with fast refresh rates (120Hz). So do not expect to get a really good experience from an out-dated display. Display factor aside, Andrew Fear – the product manager for the new technology, says you will need at least a GeForce 8800GT or better, a 32bit copy of Windows Vista (64bit support coming later) and of course a pair of Nvidia’s own stereoscopic 3D glasses.
Nvidia claims to have implemented a support library of over 350 existing DirectX 8,9 and 10 titles so far. However OpenGL games such as Quake 4 and Prey are not supported as of yet.
The glasses themselves should be shipping by the end of this year according to Andrew Fear. They’ll work wirelessly with a USB infrared transmitter and the built-in batteries should retain enough power for roughly 40 hours between charging. It sounds as though the glasses will use some type of built in shutter mechanism to shield each eye from even or odd frames.
The catch is that the monitor will have to support at least 100hz refresh rate. 50 images for each eye, for each second, there you have it - 100hz monitors. At I remember it looked very flashy - I tried it once with a borrowed monitor that supported 120Hz, and it looked a lot better that way.
Good luck on finding an LCD monitor that supports more than 75hz, let alone 120hz.
Why is NVidia reporting this as new, as it is 10 years old? Even the text is roughly the same that was on the drivers 8 years ago!!
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6449_7-6792632-1.html
I could even go for them in the current state of mainstream development.
For example: what happens when one tilts the head a bit? I know that the brain will make up for the difference, but the horizontal distance between right and left eye will decrease and so things will look weird.
I wish such gaming potential got more R&D, and head tracking became mainstream. Even VR gloves to "touch" the world... hell, so many ideas, so many ways to put current and future computational capabilities of computers to good use, and not enough R&D...
On a separate note
Tried these the first time 'round and got so motion sick I had to lie down for an hour. Apparently a certain percentage of the population get affected this way, so I would definitly try before you buy.
Bugger though, I can't find the price anywhere, if there is one. I'm guessing $500+
On a separate note
Tried these the first time 'round and got so motion sick I had to lie down for an hour. Apparently a certain percentage of the population get affected this way, so I would definitly try before you buy.
When head tilts, brain expects not just the horizontal displacement of non tracked glasses, but also some bit of vertical displacement compared to the degree of tilting. At small tilting angles the brain compensates after a couple of seconds but the brain keeps compensating even at big angles and that's what could screw with normal stereo vision. Maybe that's exactly what had caused your motion sick experience. Probably I would get a headache by trying to build depth perception from wrongly aligned stereo vision.
Compaq 19" 1024x768@120Ghz/800x600@140Hz pro monitor. The two games I played most were Doom 3 and HalfLife 2. (RTSs looked OK also including Warhammer 40K and CNC3, but glasses
are not really required for RTSs considering most objects viewed in RTSs are viewed at exactly the same position in both eyes).
I have never played HL2 without glasses - some scenes were absolutely insane; and remember all those involving vertigo. With glasses you want to survive in first person
shootemups not because your character might die, but because you actually feel the psychological effect of jumping off a ledge, looking around a corner, or facing an oncoming
rocket. Doom 3 single player was absolutely insane also - assuming you had a pitch black room, a CRT monitor with no back light, a good sound system, no cross hairs,
71.89_win2kxp_english.exe, 71.89_3dstereo.exe, set r_useTurboShadow 0, set r_useShadowVertexProgram 0, Verteran skill level, didnt save during missions, and accepted the
environment as is; you were not supposed to be able to see everything. I still consider Doom 3 the most intense game ever created. Complete Hell under these conditions. With
glasses it was clear the Tech 4 engine was superior to the Source engine.
Even at 800x600 a 2004 game in 3D looks FAR better than a 2008 game in 2D - in fact I no longer play 1st person shooters without glasses, explaining some degree of not playing
games at the moment.
If you got motion sickness from glasses there is a large possibility your glasses were not configured correctly - most importantly the stereo separation parameter and the
horizon distance paramaters. For Example I got sick when I played DoomGL/GLDoom where all objects, even the horizon, sat in front of the screen instead of behind it - the only
objects which should sit in front of the screen is your gun.
A known issue with stereo 3D is that crosshairs don't really work (only laser sights work) - since the depth of field of the cross hairs is always different than the depth of
field of the object you are trying to shoot - which means either one of these is always out of focus. Fortunately though people are waking up to the fact that at least single
player games are fun to play without cross hairs (Eg Farcry 2).
Do not ask me how this latest technology publication by Nvidia is supposed to work on LCD displays, even at 120Hz, considering the main problem of stereo 3D on LCD displays is
not the time it takes for a pixel to turn on and off, but the time for which all pixels shows one frame, then the next, and the interval between them. CRTs are fine because they
pretty much update every pixel almost instantaneously, but LCDs only update pixels sequentially, making an active glasses stereoscopic solution impossible for traditional LCD
monitors (maybe they are starting to fix this already?). ("Compatibility of LCD Monitors with Frame-Sequential Stereoscopic 3D Visualisation";
www.cmst.curtin.edu.au/publicat/2006-30.pdf). If you havnt worked it out already LCDs are 10 years behind CRTs in performance specifications; they have delayed the ideal
1stperson gaming experience because a) they preferred to manufacture cheap LCDs rather than professional flat screen CRTs, b) consumer knowledge gap, and c) bad consumer reviews
of stereo 3D technology.
Nvidia stereo 3D has always been quality software (up until their latest release; which were edited by a marketing manager to only support Anaglyph/redblue 3D glasses and
3D/polarised LCD displays with passive glasses), proving they were the leaders in 3D cards and very worthy of 3DFX whowm they purchased - compared with ATI who had no stereo 3D
solution of their own.
Richard
I have never played HL2 without glasses - some scenes were absolutely insane; and remember all those involving vertigo. With glasses you want to survive in first person shootemups not because your character might die, but because you actually feel the psychological effect of jumping off a ledge, looking around a corner, or facing an oncoming rocket. Doom 3 single player was absolutely insane also - assuming you had a pitch black room, a CRT monitor with no back light, a good sound system, no cross hairs, 71.89_win2kxp_english.exe, 71.89_3dstereo.exe, set r_useTurboShadow 0, set r_useShadowVertexProgram 0, Verteran skill level, didnt save during missions, and accepted the environment as is; you were not supposed to be able to see everything. I still consider Doom 3 the most intense game ever created. Complete Hell under these conditions. With glasses it was clear the Tech 4 engine was superior to the Source engine.
Even at 800x600 a 2004 game in 3D looks FAR better than a 2008 game in 2D - in fact I no longer play 1st person shooters without glasses, explaining some degree of not playing games at the moment.
If you got motion sickness from glasses there is a large possibility your glasses were not configured correctly - most importantly the stereo separation parameter and the horizon distance paramaters. For Example I got sick when I played DoomGL/GLDoom where all objects, even the horizon, sat in front of the screen instead of behind it - the only objects which should sit in front of the screen is your gun.
A known issue with stereo 3D is that crosshairs don't really work (only laser sights work) - since the depth of field of the cross hairs is always different than the depth of field of the object you are trying to shoot - which means either one of these is always out of focus. Fortunately though people are waking up to the fact that at least single player games are fun to play without cross hairs (Eg Farcry 2).
Do not ask me how this latest technology publication by Nvidia is supposed to work on LCD displays, even at 120Hz, considering the main problem of stereo 3D on LCD displays is not the time it takes for a pixel to turn on and off, but the time for which all pixels shows one frame, then the next, and the interval between them. CRTs are fine because they pretty much update every pixel almost instantaneously, but LCDs only update pixels sequentially, making an active glasses stereoscopic solution impossible for traditional LCD monitors (maybe they are starting to fix this already?). ("Compatibility of LCD Monitors with Frame-Sequential Stereoscopic 3D Visualisation"; www.cmst.curtin.edu.au/publicat/2006-30.pdf). If you havnt worked it out already LCDs are 10 years behind CRTs in performance specifications; they have delayed the ideal 1stperson gaming experience because a) they preferred to manufacture cheap LCDs rather than professional flat screen CRTs, b) consumer knowledge gap, and c) bad consumer reviews of stereo 3D technology.
Nvidia stereo 3D has always been quality software (up until their latest release; which were edited by a marketing manager to only support Anaglyph/redblue 3D glasses and 3D/polarised LCD displays with passive glasses), proving they were the leaders in 3D cards and very worthy of 3DFX whowm they purchased - compared with ATI who had no stereo 3D solution of their own.
Richard
this seems simple and obvious...maybe im missing something but....would be a lot easier then resting everything on upgrading a video card. and a monitor.