Stereoscopic Glasses from Nvidia

By Aaron Heibert
published

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.

Aaron Heibert
20 Comments Comment from the forums
  • chaohsiangchen
    Will Fail, period.
    Reply
  • f-gomes
    This is total crap. This is exactly what was available by then (late 90's). That so called "shutter mechanism" is LCD, if I remember it well from my pair of Elsa. These so-called new drivers have always been around, NVidia kept udpating them from time to time.
    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!!
    Reply
  • f-gomes
    You can find 3D drivers at NVidia's site, they even have versions available from 2004 and 2006 - so why is this announcement today any news?
    Reply
  • maximiza
    can you over clock those?
    Reply
  • f-gomes
    Yep. It is the same regular driver plus a small app that multiplies the frames by 2 for the RAMDAC. The only difference happens in the DAC, it has nothing to do with 3D processing.
    Reply
  • truromeo4juliet
    lol what a crock. I had a pair of stereoscopic glasses from MSI that were GeForce required, and they only worked with CRTs because the demand for a high refresh rate was so bloody high... good luck, nVidia... here's hoping you don't suck this time around
    Reply
  • LCD monitors exist at 120Hz, some TVs go this high.
    http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6449_7-6792632-1.html
    Reply
  • virtualban
    I have never tried but am very curious about these kinds of things. I expected more tests from Toms Hardware, not a lone article more than a year ago.
    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.
    Reply
  • virtualban
    I mean, for example a 45 degree tilt of the head, if tracked, will make the virtual cameras display what the brain would perceive for the tilted head, but what would happen when virtual cameras will stay horizontal and display horizontal displacement of images (at the same distance and angle despite changing positions). It could even mess up stereo perception just like using just one eye does. And it will be especially painful and maybe irreversible in children.

    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...
    Reply
  • "what happens when one tilts the head a bit?". You just see the 3D image on the screen tilted a bit - there is no tracking here, just a couple of LCD shutter on the glasses to block every other frame.

    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.
    Reply