NVIDIA Offers 3D Glasses For the Masses 261
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."
Retinal Projection (Score:3, Interesting)
It's wouldn't be susceptible to parallax error. They had it in the Star Trek future, why can't we have it in our proper future?
Man is annoyed by this.
New? (Score:2, Interesting)
A company named Elsa had 3D shutter glasses for NVidia cards in 2000-2001 or so. I still have a wired and wireless pair. I think NVidia bought them out ages ago and put the 3D stuff in the Detonator drivers. I remember playing Thief 2 with those glasses (it was AWESOME). No idea if they still work, my current game rig has an ATI card.
Re:New? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have the older glasses (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Gaming? (Score:0, Interesting)
It's cool. Try it.
Google it, cross your eyes, and enjoy.
Never seen movies though, only still shots. Anyone have a link?
3D Polarized Monitor? (Score:2, Interesting)
If anyone has ever worn sunglasses while looking at an LCD monitor, you quickly discover that tilting your head causes the screen to go black in specific orientations.
Hasn't anyone tried to manufacture an LCD with alternating LCD polarity between adjacent lines of pixels? Mounting cheap polarized films on any frame is all you'd need to split the monitor image between left and right eye. No shutter frames needed, the video card merely splits an image into stripes for the left and right eye at normal refesh rates. Same idea as "progressive scanning" images on some HDTVs
Re:Accessories? (Score:4, Interesting)
If RTFA :), you'll notice that previous systems used refresh rates in the 30Hz range for each eye, which indeed would lead to severe headaches. This system uses 120Hz total (for 60Hz to each eye) which is much more tolerable and shouldn't cause as much eye strain. 80Hz to each eye would be eve better, but we'll see.
Overall though, the general effect shouldn't cause any headaches aside from the refresh rate problems. Afterall most of us walk around all day seeing in 3d - it's just that the objects aren't coming off a screen :).
Re: Peripheral vision is important. 3D is not. (Score:3, Interesting)
For most of the games we tried (FPS games, etc), 3d wasn't spectacular. But for racing games, I found the 3d effect (with an eMagin head mounted display) to really make the game better - you got a real sense of speed.
I think the thing that will push this over the top is good head tracking. If your perspective changed with head movement, I think the 3d illusion would be really compelling.
Re:New? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've got a Zalman monitor that does precisely that.
It's great. Unlike anaglyph, it doesn't suffer from ghosting and color problems. Unlike shutter glasses it doesn't require any special support: If you have the monitor, and the glasses, all that's needed is to produce a correctly formatted image. So it can work with any video card without specific support, and you can view 3D photos by just opening the image in the web browser.
The only disadvantage is that horizontal resolution is halved. But it's still much better than the other options.
OpenGL support? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:New? (Score:1, Interesting)
The product was called ELSA Revelator. The company went bankrupt in 2002. A company called "Neue ELSA GmbH" was founded by the former CEO of ELSA AG, and went under as well. Another company founded in the wake of the ELSA AG is Devolo AG, which is alive and well and best known for its powerline communication products.
The ELSA Revelator was indeed all that the summary mentions. More info is here. [stereo3d.com] The Achilles heel was driver support, until support for stereo viewing became available in stock Nvidia drivers, but that support didn't last long. Some other problems with the "automatic" stereo separation (without explicit game support) will most likely also plague the reinvention of the concept: Lens flares, halos, crosshairs and HUD elements appear to stick to the screen because they're drawn with a z-value of 0. The range of z-values varies from game to game and it can be problematic to find a stereo separation width that provides a nice 3D effect without causing headaches due to double vision effects. The ELSA programmers tried to solve the latter problem with a library of manually tuned settings for popular games, heuristics for other games and a tweak overlay for manual adjustments.
Re:New? (Score:4, Interesting)
Correction (or emphasis perhaps, since you did mention it), as I had a pair of glasses as well, they worked IF the game used the Z buffer 'correctly'. However many games did wacky stuff with their UI's and the Z buffer, making it do all sorts of wacky stuff.
I think I remember one game had set the "base" of the UI to be at the bottom, while all the interactive parts were at the top, so while it looked correctly without the glasses you had an UI that looked as if it were sunk well below the 'game window' and the dials and gauges are such were floating in the air. What's more, they weren't just floating above the spots they would have had on the base, but offset.
Another game, for some reason, had every other element at a different level, meaning while (again) the UI looked normal without the glasses, it looked like something Escher and Dali would have co-created while on LSD.
Duke Nukem Forever? (Score:5, Interesting)
I may be responsible for the fact that Duke Nukem 4ever has yet to be released.
A year or three (a long time ago, I don't remember exactly when) after Duke Nukem 3-D came out, there was a gaming discussion site called Planet Crap. It was a low visibility site, and most of the folks who posted there tried to keep it that way, not mentioning or linking it on their own sites.
It was a site shared by gamers, game webmasters (who were of course all gamers), and industry insiders. Warren Marshall posted there (he was a pirate in his college days, which is why he fears pirates so badly), as did several of his artists and programmers. People from ID posted there, and Charles Broussard and his people posted there as well.
There was a discussion one day, I don't remember the topic, but Mr. broussard was posting. I wondered out loud why Duke Nukem 3-D was not really 3-D at all, but 2-D perspective. Charles said something to the effect of "we don't yet have holographic displays". I mentioned stereoscopic viewing and suggested red/green glasses.
Duke Nukem 4ever became more and more a joke as time went by, but I've always wondered if they were working on a true 3-D game. These glasses in TFA would do the trick far better than the red/green glasses.
I also wonder when we're going to have truly holographic displays? All one would need would be a high enough resolution LCD, with instead of a white backlight, a mirrored back and a laser frontlight. It would be monochromatic, but I think you could work it out with three lasers each firing in turn and tied to display different diffraction patters so that it could be true color, true 3-D. It would be more than stereoscopic viewing as these glasses are, but true 3-D, so you could actually see around the displayed objects by moving your head (if you've ever seen a real hologram you know what I mean).
Re:Who are those "masses" ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not only is it $199 for the glasses, but you also need the following (according to NVIDIA's product page):
Re:Retinal Projection (Score:1, Interesting)
MicroVision has had laser retinal displays for years now. (mvis.com). unfortunately, despite their great tech, they couldn't sell water in a desert. Luckily many of their patents are about to (or already have) run out...
Product tie-in scam... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've had this question since the tech was shown last year. Can you choose to run this on older displays? Some people still have older 120hz+ capable CRTs that should work just fine. Other people, like myself, have never had a problem with eyestrain on low refresh monitors and would like to try it on their existing monitors. Mine is a brand new 28" LCD with ~85hz max refresh. I have no intention of spending more money on a new monitor after having just purchased one, especially not a monitor significantly smaller than what I have now.
The article, however, suggests that the drivers are designed to check for (not just the 120hz capability) but for specific models of monitor that are "approved" by Nvidia. What I think is going on here is very similar to what happened when they released their first Stereo 3d drivers for Vista and I consider it a product tie-in scam as well as poor treatment of their customers.
Nvidia sold people on the 3d shutter glasses tech years ago. When CRTs died and the first generation of LCDs couldn't handle decent refresh rates Nvidia dropped support for the drivers. They didn't do it in a classy way, they just stopped talking about it and left their customers hanging. They never made it clear that they weren't going to update them and when rumors spread about stereo support being planned for the 8800 series people bought the new cards expecting the drivers that never came. Again, Nvidia kept quiet.
When news of the upcoming Vista stereo drivers started leaking, with what seemed to be tacit confirmation from Nvidia, people that had spent money on the hardware were excited. They were in for a rude awakening when it turned out that Nvidia had gone as far as to remove support for any stereo hardware they had pushed in the past and tried to require specific models of 3D monitors sold by their business partners. Basically, my understanding is, they had screwed over their past and present customers by handy-capping their drivers in exchange for payment from the monitor company. Here is a company that wants us to buy their video card (and now their shutter glasses) but is also trying to force us to throw out our present monitors, whether we need to or not, before we are allowed to use their 3d features and the only real justification is an artificial software block they put there themselves.
This is what I think is happening here again. I think they've probably made a deal with the monitor/projector manufacturers to be paid for the "Nvidia Approved" status which is why only two displays are allowed regardless of all the older CRTs still existing that match their supposed justification of high refresh rate. I'm smart enough to understand that it took extra work to go out of their way to take the power to decide for myself away from me. Nvidia needs to remember who their actual customers are and stop treating them as an afterthought. They're already on shaky ground with their present generation of cards competing poorly against ATI for price/performance. I, certainly, don't need Nvidia trying to force a Mitsubishi (or any other specific company's) monitor down my throat before I'm able to use a Nvidia product).
Re:Accessories? (Score:2, Interesting)
I have the same problem with Far Cry 2. If you're running in widescreen, the screwed up FoV could be part of your problem. This tool will let you fix it http://tocaedit.com/forum/dload.php?action=file&file_id=119 [tocaedit.com]
It also helps to turn down the graphics settings to get rid of the head killing blurring effects. I think I got rid of that by going to DX9 mode and setting the post effects to low.
Of course your best option is just to not play it. It's a bad game. I don't think I ever would have had the will to finish it if I didn't get a trainer so I could walk super fast.
Re:Accessories? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Accessories? (Score:2, Interesting)
120hz may be less annoying, but the only 60hz screen i can look at is an LCD since it's a constant on. By using a shutter to 'flash' the screen at your eyes, this is going cause eye strain because it will be somewhat simular to a CRT.
While a CRT scans the screen vs this flashing the entire screen at once, it may not be as bad as I think it would.
Re:Further taking RTFA apart (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not just that (Score:3, Interesting)
They couldn't have fucked this up better if they tried. I am outraged by the whole thing.
First they patently drop support for a perfectly good (I ran it with a 100Hz CRT), cheap 3D solution, very blatantly doing everything they can to kill 3D. Then they get to a point where you have to buy their buddies' high-priced 3D LCD monitors. Now they're making their own hugely expensive solution, once again forcing you to go out and buy a special special LCD when most old CRT's are more than up to the job. That doesn't smell like a rat?
And the old support that they already had, that already worked, is still MIA. They're not trying to bring 3D mainstream. I refuse to believe it. Mainstream means cheap. Not "you have to go buy the most expensive LCD you can find".
There's nothing new or great about their solution. What they're doing sucks balls and they know it.