How Nvidia Wants To Bring 3D Glasses Back 341
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."
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?
Re:"Mostly" monitors? (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.
How does this impact SLI? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:"Mostly" monitors? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Give it a chance! We need it to work! (Score:2, Interesting)
diopter adjustment, please? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's only a matter of time (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"Mostly" monitors? (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly. Luckily, people are working on devices that don't require glasses [usc.edu].
Re:Effective refresh rate (Score:2, Interesting)
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!"
3D is just a gimmick (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Can I have my 5 minutes back? (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)
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.
Re:My religious stance? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:My religious stance? (Score:2, Interesting)
Did you ever figure out why this happened to you?
If you are an IT professional, then by now you surely realize that while things like this really do happen to people, it's not what most people experience. Like many, I run Vista without getting any more crashes or weirdness than I got with Windows XP (which is to say very little).
It does eat RAM like a starving whale snarfing down krill and certain file operations are obnoxiously long, but other than that it's not half bad and I've grown rather attached to certain sidebar gadgets.