Slashdot Mirror

If you RTFA there is no mention of this.

In-Three's "prototype" liquid crystal shutter glasses are not new. There is nothing to suggest that they are any different to those available from Stereographics or VRex, for example. This is just re-reporting of old news.

Companies such as DDD have been doing semi-automatic 2D->3D conversion for years; it's difficult to do well, time consuming and expensive. Don't get excited just yet.

Really, the only display tech that really blew me away used dual rear projectors that fed back into one another to achieve alignment, then emitted polarized light onto a single screen. With very light and simple glasses, the effect was utterly seamless.

I vaguely remember the spinning display approach also worked.

I found some info on the web about 3D projectors for use with polarised glasses as well as a spinning display a while back. Are these the ones you are talking about? This website has a lot of information about 3D displays and technology if you're interested.

The VR-4200 is our active projector that works with shutter glass technology. Weighing just under 6 pounds, it is the first lightweight, portable 3D projector based on the advanced DLP(TM) technology, allowing for superior resolution and brightness. The VR-4200 is an affordable solution for research in the area of scientific visualization.

However: the DepthCharge plugin they have for viewing 3D content in a webpage Just Plain Sucks -- it doesn't keep state and remember what kind of glasses you have so you need to pick it again and again and again.

The best-viewing mode with these glasses is interlaced (in addition to left/right image pairs, the dongle will blank our alternate scan lines on your monitor improving the effect a lot). Unfortunately on my glasses this mode requires you to hold-down a button on the glasses-controller, so it sucks for gaming without duct tape.

Video cards and drivers that will put out stereo image-pairs are few and far between. Make sure your card will, or buy a card that will if you want to do any gaming. Game compatability is also an issue. Google will help here.

Eyestrain. 'nuff said.

It needs to be done in a completely dark room -- any light reflecting off of your monitor will tend to ruin the illusion of 3d.

Your screen needs to be resonably flat -- curved monitors distort the 3d image ruining the illusion.

Polarized lenses would be perfect but cannot be used (so far) without special expensive displays.

This (.pdf) doesn't look like it would be too expensive.

FM888

Having written stereo code for a molecular graphics program, UCSF chimera, I really want quad-buffered stereo in a window so my program can present a modern GUI and a stereo image at the same time. I don't like blue-line stereo because it is for full screen stereo and that screws up the GUI. Unfortunately for the Mac, I know of no graphics cards that support quad-buffered stereo. We have asked Apple about it and they are "considering" it. Please keep pressuring Apple to add quad-buffered stereo support -- it will only happen if Apple does it because Apple writes its own graphics card drivers. In the mean time, check out the micropol displays from Vrex. We have preliminary support for them in chimera and I'm sure you could get Warren Delano to add support to pymol.

I just don't think there are enough of us to justify a standard for stereo-compression.

Stereo-pairs should only have to be ever-so-slightly bigger than a single image/video, since the 2nd is < insert big percentage > redundant.

Maybe we should bug the guys that make DepthCharge