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How Nvidia Wants To Bring 3D Glasses Back
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Sep 17, 2008 11:07 AM
from the so-stylish dept.
from the so-stylish dept.
notthatwillsmith writes "For the last ten years, we've heard the promise of 3D shutter glasses, which when combined with the proper video card drivers and a good display, can trick your brain into thinking that your 2D monitor is creating 3D images. Unfortunately the glasses never really took off, partly because there were rendering problems with many popular 3D games but mostly because monitors didn't support high enough refresh rates to display games without giving people crushing headaches. Nvidia thinks they've solved both problems--the software works much better, and there are a surprising number of supported 120Hz-capable TVs and monitors that ameliorate the headache factor. Maximum PC has a hands-on with Nvidia's new tech, plus details about Nvidia's planned hardware solution."
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NVIDIA Offers 3D Glasses For the Masses 261 comments
Vigile writes "A new stereoscopic 3D gaming technology has hit the street today from NVIDIA, though demoed earlier in the year, that promises to bring high quality 3D gaming to the PC. The GeForce 3D Vision technology utilizes active shutter glasses and a 120 Hz display (either 120 Hz LCD or 3D-Ready DLP TVs) to bring an immersive 3D effect to PC games. Using the depth buffer information stored in DirectX, the NVIDIA software is able to construct a stereo 3D image out of existing game content while the 120 Hz requirement gives each eye 60 frames of motion per second negating the physical detriments that were known to occur with previous 3D offerings. The review at PC Perspective details how the technology works, the performance hit your games take while using it and the advantages and disadvantages to the user's gaming experience with 3D Vision."
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Can I have my 5 minutes back? (Score:2, Insightful)
Windows Vista 32-bit (64-bit support coming soon)
Couldn't this have been at the top of the article?
Re:Can I have my 5 minutes back? (Score:4, Funny)
But you'll appreciate how that BSOD really pops out of the screen in 3D. Or the progress bar while waiting for file copies.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Don't forget narrowly avoiding the swinging anamorphic appendages of a personified paperclip.
Re:Can I have my 5 minutes back? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea... like the games that will support it will work in Linux...
Lets be reasonable. You are making a new device trying to get new customers, why would you make XP or Linux drivers first... XP is on its way out. Yea Vista sucks but with more and more companies no longer shipping XP means more people will get Vista Preinstalled. Linux is not a gaming platform, it is barely a desktop platform, it only has like 1% market share, most of these people are running on Linux that is not powerful enough to run the drivers. so .25% market share? Yea lets spend millions of dollars in a new product design and spend half the funds for a tiny knitch market.
Most hardware purchases are sold when they get new hardware, thus getting Vista Preinstalled. So if I were to get my Ultimate Game computer with all the hardware I would have vista anyways.
Now if the product kicks off and becomes popular then you will get more drivers Linux drivers Mac Drivers, if there is still demmand they may have XP drivers. But if you are going to release a new product you might as well develop for the latest version, no matter what you religious stance is.
Parent
Re:Can I have my 5 minutes back? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not sure I have nerve to play Angband with this anyway -- those capital Z's will be terrifying in 3D!
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My religious stance? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sorry, I don't think we've met. Yes, I don't like Vista. But it's not a religious stance against Microsoft. In fact, I hold 4 Microsoft certifications (MCSE, MCSD VB6, MCSD C#.Net, MCDBA) and work on Microsoft products all day every day. In fact, I did a 6 month contract programming job for Microsoft themselves as a side job.
I bought a new computer 3 months ago. Middle-of-the-road Dell system, dual core 2.4 GHz, 4 GB RAM, 1 TB disk space. It came pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux, but I installed Vista Ultimate 64 bit on it. (Did I forget to mention I'm also an MSDN Subscriber which lets me install any software I want for testing purposes?). I installed Vista because I was sick of hearing how bad it was. Long story short, after the fresh install and setting up all my drivers so I had the latest of all devices in the Device Manager, I was having applications crash about every 5 minutes. So I figured it was a 64 bit problem. I installed Vista Ultima 32-bit and got all the drivers updated. Same problem. I updated the firmware. Same problem. I installed Windows XP SP3. 3 months later and if it's had a single application crash in that time, I'd be surprised.
So, I'm just one person but I have no religious stance against Microsoft, was looking forward to installing Vista, had issues with it that 12 hours of trying to fix it did not resolve. And I have 20 years experience in professional IT using almost exclusively Microsoft products going back to MS-DOS 3.3.
If that's a religious stance to you, that's beyond silly.
Parent
Re:My religious stance? (Score:5, Funny)
Beyond silly? That's not beyond silly. A football helmet full of cottage cheese, now that's beyond silly.
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Re:My religious stance? (Score:5, Insightful)
I got a new Dell a couple of months ago myself. An Inspiron 540 with a 2.4 GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of Ram. It came installed with one of the several dozen versions of Vista, the one a step above home.
I originally was intent on getting XP, but my brother recommended Vista just to give it a try. I was reluctant, given the constant onslaught of negative press and my own brief interactions with the system. I've tinkered with it in stores and have used it briefly on my coworker's laptop.
Lo and behold, I actually thought the OS was quite decent. Thus far, I haven't had a single issue. I've been quite pleased and I do generally feel it improves on XP.
It's more than I can say for OSX 10.5. I have far more issues with my iMac at the office running that OS than I've had with my iMac at home running 10.4. It seems that people just are as vocal about problems with OSX.
So I can't but wonder if I'm one of the few to not have problems or if too many people are simply jumping on the bandwagon and putting down Vista without actually having used it. It's almost like it's a fad to crap on Microsoft. And I'm sure I'll be dismissed as a Microsoft fanboy.
Parent
Re:My religious stance? (Score:5, Informative)
Really? Because I have 4 PC's in my house at the moment running windows Vista, 1x Home Premium 64, 2x Ultimate 64 and one Ultimate 32. In the last month of near-constant use for everything from 3D rendering applications, heavy gaming, casual use and more there has been a grand total of 0 crashes between all 4 PCs.
One of the PC's started having problems, but that turned out to be related to the NVidia 8500 drivers, using the onboard ATI HD3200 it runs smooth and stable pretty much around the clock.
You can throw around your certifications all you like, although expecting them to earn you anything more than cursory mod points on slashdot is rather just e-penis inflation. What applications were crashing? How are you able to say beyond question that these crashes were the fault of Vista? So your computer crashes on an application and your first method of troubleshooting is to install a new operating system? Srsly?
At least you weren't modded all the way to insightful, but if you want to come out sounding like anything more than just someone bashing Vista like everyone else on /. then I'd like some form of intelligent support behind your claims.
Or this, I'm a certified Linux user, I bash Windows on public forums all the time, I even have a penguin sticker on my car! I use linux all day, every day. However, when I went to install the newest distro of Bandwagon 0.8, certain things would crash. (Did I forget to mention that I've got internet access, which lets me download imaginary credentials?) Anyway, since something didn't work, I decided to turn the monitor upside down and install Bandwagon in a different language. Still doesn't work....
I could keep going, but it stops being funny and becomes sad rather quickly in this context. All you provided was a set of credentials which describe probably a good 75% of the users of this forum, and a REALLY pointless story that shows me nothing except your absolutely horrid reasoning skills. (And I'm even being generous and assuming that before reformatting your OS you were intelligent enough to check the application's website to ensure compatability with 64-bit Vista). I mean, there are so many things WRONG with your reasoning that I can't stop myself from typing. Did you try using compatability modes? Did you take ownership of the application? I give up, but I hope you feel better about having earned your vista-bashing certifications on /.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"XP is on its way out"
False. It's actually beating Vista anywhere consumers have a choice, and of course there's no way to track all the pirated copies that are being used to "downgrade" from Vista.
Vista can't play games XP can on the same hardware. That's a pretty damning indictment. (Increased system resources)
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"Mostly" monitors? (Score:5, Funny)
OK, sure, refresh rates are an issue, but you don't think it was mostly that people don't want to wear special glasses for gaming? We haven't yet aged so much as a demographic that we can say "let me put on my gaming glasses" with a straight face.
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Looking at the pics they seem rather small not much bigger then plastic frames of the 1980's. A lot less geeky then they use to be.
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Which is fine if you don't need glasses for normal vision. One pair of glasses over another is never good.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
There are stereoscopic displays, I think a panel is behind something like a lenticular sheet. I think that's the only reasonable way to do 3D.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I love the glasses. They're so bad!
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But I think that the really big market for this will be the console, so I want to know- Will this work on any of the current/planned TV technologies?
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Re:"Mostly" monitors? (Score:4, Funny)
I'd wear special glasses if it made stuff 3D. No question.
You could have just posted "GIMMIE 3D PORN!" like you thought.
Parent
Re:"Mostly" monitors? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:"Mostly" monitors? (Score:5, Informative)
Gah, cues goddamnit!!! Not queues. Cues!!! You'd think Slashdot of all places would get that right ...
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Re:"Mostly" monitors? (Score:4, Insightful)
You also wouldn't think the nun chuck Wii controller and boxing would have been popular considering how stupid it looks but its taking off as well.
Also One of my favorite sega genesis games had the lcd based 3d glasses. While they were crazy uncomfortable the potential seems pretty impressive, I'm sure they could work things out. We have to be better at video game ergonomics now than we were when I was a kid.
I WANT MY FREAKING 3D GAMES!!!!
Parent
Re:"Mostly" monitors? (Score:4, Informative)
It was the Sega Master System that had the 3d glasses. I have one, and I found the 3d effect really difficult to maintain. The depth of field is very limited. anything significantly in front of or behind the object you're focusing on is a double image.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly. Luckily, people are working on devices that don't require glasses [usc.edu].
Re:"Mostly" monitors? (Score:4, Insightful)
I dont think its the glasses. The problem here is that 2D is really good enough for humans. We have a good idea of how things look in 3D space on a 2D screen. Its not such a huge problem for us. The glasses just feel extraneous and gimmicky.
2D is good enough in most cases, but not all. I think 2D has stunted the growth of true 3D design in games that just aren't possible otherwise.
Some interesting effects of 2D on 3D games are:
- When using a knife/punching, players run continuously at the opponent like an idiot to make sure they are within distance. Because they really can't tell if they are or not.
- Any kind of platforming requires just the right camera angle. Otherwise it really is just a leap of faith.
- Targeting systems in third person games to make sure you don't flail your sword like an idiot missing your target. Even then distance can be tricky.
These are all tricks to make up for lack of 3D. While humans can do an admiral job adapting, but it's no substitute. Go ask a person who has lost sight in one eye (maybe not).
Parent
Effective refresh rate (Score:2, Insightful)
a refresh rate of 120Hz still means you have an effective refresh rate of 60Hz for each eye.
Personally, I'm a little sensitive to low refresh rates; anything below 75Hz will give me a headache, and I prefer 85Hz or more. Some monitors can show 170 frames per second, but those are very rare.
Also, this won't work with LCD displays, because they are just to slow.
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It's only a matter of time (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone is going to create a way to convert standard porn to 3D and then these things will really take off.
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Did they deliberately disable OpenGL? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been using Nuvison and Crystaleyes glasses for about 8 years with the Linux NVidia drivers; How did they manage to not have that in their new product?
Ignore the monitor! (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of hoping that your monitor is good enough, lets get LCD glasses that display something better then 800x600. Most eye glasses are around 2" in diameter, if you could cram enough pixels into that space to give a minimum of ~1024x768 resolution then you will have a market.
Portable gaming anyone? portable and PRIVATE browsing? Sign me up.
Bucking the peripherals trend? (Score:4, Funny)
A long time ago, there was a big market for perifrials in games: joysticks, etc. I think at that point a substantial portion of the gaming market were playing flight sims. Latching on to that were more arcade-style games that benefited from joysticks: Wing Commander, X-Wing, etc.
Since then, there's be a decrease in the number of peripherals. If the game doesn't play well with mouse and keyboard, it usually isn't played. Even on consoles, it's rough to convince people to play games with something other than the standard controller.
Now nvidia wants us to but special nerd glasses and special nerd monitors for a 3D effect (windows Vista only). I'm not sure it'll fly.
Also, reading that interview, Andrew FEAR sounds like a toolburger. Yeah, 3D could be fOMG amazing one eleventy exclamation point, but I'd rather have a better game.
Re:Bucking the peripherals trend? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even on consoles, it's rough to convince people to play games with something other than the standard controller.
Like Guitar Hero/Rock Band/Singstar? Or Buzz? Or Wii Fit?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Even on consoles, it's rough to convince people to play games with something other than the standard controller.
Like Guitar Hero/Rock Band/Singstar? Or Buzz? Or Wii Fit?
Or the Wii remote even.
.
How does this impact SLI? (Score:2, Interesting)
Visuals, Smisuals (Score:4, Funny)
If I can't poke it in the eye or shove a sword through its guts, I don't consider it true 3D. Give me a holodeck with the safety features disabled, a BFG, and a flask of whiskey -- then we'll talk about licensing your technology.
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Dump the Monitors and It'll Catch On (Score:4, Interesting)
If 3D glasses just dumped the monitors and went wireless, they'd catch on. They need to be transparent, so the display is projected into the real field of view, and maybe have a black LCD layer to actually shut out the outside light.
But if they worked like that, the first iPod to use them for video would push them over the edge into the mainstream once and for all.
Unfortunately, we'll need a breakthru in batteries to power high framerate hirez good color wireless glasses with fast radio bandwidth to the device putting out the frames. Maybe the breakthru glasses will be hollow for fuelcell juice.
Riiiiight... (Score:3, Informative)
Um, no. The glasses never took off because no one wanted to wear clunky, heavy glasses with a HUGE battery pack or cable attachment. (Or even better, two cables: sync and power.) Not to mention the hardware integrated into the frame for manipulating the shutter or polarization of each lens...
And then there's the fact that a fair amount of gaming is not done in the solitude of a dorm room or mom's basement, but in public. And how would you look wearing a pair of shuttering glasses in Starbucks? True 3D is cool, but even nerds have their - our - limits.
But, hey, this is Nvidia trying to find a raison d'etre after its sole niche becomes commoditized. I get that, but that doesn't make it not stupid. Next I suppose Nvidia will start touting other good-only-at-first-glance peripherals: the Nvidia gyroscopic mouse, the Nvidia true-3D-audio speaker set, and the Nvidia dvorak keyboard...
- David Stein
Chose your own oblig. (Score:3, Funny)
Please select one of the following:
No! (Score:3, Insightful)
Speaking as a person who has vision in only one eye, I say NO!
Come up with a way to wire 3d images directly to my brain.
It'd be pretty cool to see what most of you folks see everyday.
3D glasses suck. Head tracking is the right way. (Score:5, Interesting)
3D glasses are like video phones. They re-surface every few years, when "new technology" makes them cheaper than the last generation, and then they vanish silently because people hate using them.
In both cases the problem isn't technology. Video phones were feasible since the 50s or 60s. In the case of 3D glasses, the refresh rate was never the problem. After all, >80Hz displays were available for a long time now and 40FPS isn't exactly shoddy.
The problem is that stereoscopic vision is a surprisingly minor part of "seeing in 3D". It is limited in range to about as far as you can jump. In fact ~5% of people don't have stereoscopic vision and they function fine, including driving. Many of them don't even know they lack it. I used to work somewhere hiring operators for stereoplotters (devices displaying stereoscopic aerial photos for analysis). Good ones were hard to find.
Most of your "3D vision" actually comes from your brain analyzing a stream of 2D images. This is why you get a better 3D feel for movies than for static pictures. In real life, this effect is combined with the brain tracking how your head moves. It is this combination that gives most of the "true" 3D vision effect - *not* stereoscopy.
This trick is used, for example, by snakes - a spitting cobra will sway its head side to side to get a 3D image of the world, so it can spit poison in your eye from 3-5m away. Stereoscopic vision would be useless for it since the snake's eyes are so close together.
A 3D display system based on this idea is simpler to implement and easier to user than using 3D glasses. See the impressive demo in http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw [youtube.com] for an example.
Notice how objects can appear to be *behind* you and how ducking and moving become a natural part of the experience. This could transform FPS...
Sure, this only works for a single user at a time, but that's hardly an issue for gamers. The demo above uses the Wii motion sensor but it is also possible to use a simple webcam to track your head, as well as many other methods.
Webcams are widely accessible, reasonably priced, and work with PCs and game consoles such as the Xbox 360. The user may need to wear a headband with two LEDs on it, but again that's not an issue for gamers. Besides it provides a marketing opportunity (like console panels). Smarter software could detect "heads" automatically without any additional hardware.
All you need is the right update to the Xbox software, or wrapper for DirectX on the PC, and we could have widely spread "true" 3D experience *right now*. No new hardware, full resolution and refresh rate, and better user experience for first-person games.
Like the guy in the video above said, "I want to see some games!"
I've been using this for a while (Score:5, Interesting)
nVidia's driver has supported shutter glasses (and several other stereoscopic view modes) for a while. The older forceware driver had issues with SLI but I never had that setup in my machine anyway. I did end up picking up a refurb widescreen CRT that can do 96hz refresh at 1900x1200, and obviously higher at lower refresh rates.
Aside from the obvious issues of having half the effective refresh rate, there are issues with low gamma (which can be corrected in the driver) and ghosting from the other eye as the dark shutter isn't completely opaque. All in all, it's quite an enjoyable experience once you acclimate to these behaviors.
I never noticed a performance hit in my gaming, as they seem to be doing a fairly simple re-arrangement of z-buffer data for the effect. The quality of the effect is largely dependent on support in the games themselves. Stuff like Half-Life 2 didn't setup their HUD in a manner that allowed it to display in the same place from both perspectives - It seemed as though it was a 2d overlay at the very front of the view. Others like GTA3 got the HUD right but things like street lights and such were in the same plane and would split into doubles when you looked "deeper" into the picture where they were supposed to be displayed.
As it stands you have several options for driver based stereo:
1) Shutter glasses - Fairly cheap these days, I think I paid $15 for mine, but low refresh and gamma issues. If you tilt your head more than about 5 degrees from one side to the other, the effect will disappear
2) Colored Glasses - The nVidia driver can separate a stereoscopic view into 2 color fields to use with normal dual color glasses. This gives full refresh and is cheap but you end up with an effectively grayscale image, no issues with tilting your head I'm aware of.
3) LCD screen glasses - expensive, probably limited to 800x600@60hz unless you want to take out a loan. No restrictions on head position.
4) Dual monitors - This is one I've wanted to try as I have 2 monitors of the same make. You set up 2 monitors side by side with a mirror angled in such a way that one eye sees the reflection of one monitor when looking straight ahead while the other eye looks directly at other monitor. The driver then shows a mirrored stereo perspective on the second monitor. This has the advantages of being cheaper than LCD screen glasses, giving full resolution and refresh and no gamma issues. Of course your head has to remain in a fairly static spot for it to work - but at least you can tilt it without ruining the effect.
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Clarification (Score:3, Funny)
I believe you meant, "polishing a turd".
The correct lipstick references are "lipstick on a pig" and/or "lipstick on a pitbull".
Re:Clarification (Score:5, Funny)
While you can't polish a turd, you can roll it in glitter!
Parent
Great monitors and Great Glasses (Score:3, Informative)
Crystal Eyes and Monochrome monitors. The monochrome monitors were capable of putting out 200+ fL of light (about 4x brighter than your typical out-of-the-box LCD) and the crystal eye shuttered glasses were capable of extinguishing 99+ of the light. The result was a realistic, if slowly refreshed, 3D image.
I've also looked at a number of displays- my favorite so far is the Stereo Planar- still requires polarized glasses but the display is sharp and fast and, when integrated with the 24" NEC IPS panels giv
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NVidia might have a
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Why don't they just make the glasses so big that you put them over the monitor isntead? That way people don't need to wear them to get the 3D effect?
If you put the glasses on the monitor, both eyes would see the same thing at the same time.
Yes, but the monitor could watch *you* in 3D! 'Course, this only works in Soviet Russia...