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eDimensional Wired 3D Glasses Review
Julio writes "Today at TechSpot we have reviewed eDimensional's Wired 3D Glasses, based on the original 3D Stereo technology that became popular a few years ago, these revamped version of the glasses seem to offer much more value and compatibility to the table. Adding amazing effects to games we tested which include Jedi Outcast and some other racing and flight simulators, this item could easily make it into your holiday shop list...
"The images looked very cool, and I spent about 10 minutes gawking at my new surroundings. After playing around with Jedi Outcast, I was ready for more. I checked the supported game list, and just about every game I had was listed there.""
But I currently have them up for sale. After purchasing them, I tried to get them to work with my ATI Radeon, and it had limited support.
It worked great for browsing the 3D pictures on their website, but when it came to games, nothing I did could get it to work properly.
I then tried it on my friends NVIDIA card, and we got quake3 working, and I have to admit, it is a lot better than the previous 3d glasses (ie; asus). After playing with them and being amazed for about 30 minutes, all I could really think though was 'novelty'. They didn't enhance game play in any way, and it actually took relearning some of my trained reactions in quake3.
Unfortunately my main goal was to get it working in Dungeon Siege, and I could never accomplish that.
2.5 stars/5
I was only able to get the first page before the Slashdotting killed it. Here ya go...
Computers offer the best and most impressive gaming graphics, besting any other console found on today's market; however as of late we have the PC losing some ground as a gaming platform due to impressive development efforts from the popular console makers; a relatively new system with a powerful graphics card offers the most realistic graphics you'll ever lay your eyes on.
Not satisfied with that, PC gamers are always looking for the next best thing to enhance their visual experience. Some might purchase a flat screen monitor; others may choose a faster graphics card which handles higher resolutions. Now that your system is decked out to the hilt, what's next? Well, companies like eDimensional hope you will eventually add some 3D Gaming glasses to the mix.
3D glasses have been out for some time now, but the technology is getting better with every release. Companies like NVIDIA continue to update drivers to improve the 3D gaming experience, which has many companies believing that some day all gamers will own a pair. So is this really the next best thing, or will this leave you looking like a geek for nothing?
Today I'll be reviewing a pair of 3D glasses made by a company called eDimensional. The company was founded in 2000, mainly focusing on enhancing the multimedia experience. They call their 3D technology E-D, and promise it to supply you with an amazing submersive 3D environment. One of the main reasons I decided to review this product was to see how it compared to the DTI 2015XLS 3D LCD Display I reviewed not so long ago, if you can recall that expensive gadget costs nothing less but $1700.
How It Works
I don't know the technical lingo to explain how 3D works, but I'll sum it up as best I can. Basically, people have two eyes and your eyes see things from a perspective when looking at objects depending on their locations, which is called binocular disparity. One eye sees one side of an object, and the other eye sees the other side. Your brain uses both views to create one three dimensional image. So this means the depth you actually see is just a perception of what the brain thinks it is; it may not actually be the true look of an image. Pretty weird stuff, eh?
Anyhow, the E-D system shows you a two eye view from your computer monitor. The depth-of-field is simulated using shutter-glasses with lenses that can alternate between clean and opaque (blocks light). While using the glasses, a left eye image is first displayed on a computer monitor, and the shutter-glasses left lens is clear, while the right lens is dark. The image on the monitor is then switched to the right-eye view, and the lens of the shutter-glasses is reversed. This switching occurs many times per second, fast enough for your eyes not to notice it. Your brain fuses the separate images together to create 3D. Yes, it's just your brains perception of what the image should look like. Pretty neat how we can trick the brain, don't you think?
I used to work for a small company called 3DTV that was a splinter group from Sterographics. I worked on software and marketing for hte first round of consumer shutter glasses, back when you had to use DOS (as in C:\) becuase Windows couldn't do page flipping synced to the monitor refresh rate (one flip per refresh). I for one was allways very fond of this tech', provided that you ran at 120hz or higher so that each eye is getting a full 60hz. In addition you need to turn off any other light source as even a basic light build has a refresh that can cause headaches if it is not in sync with the monitor (imagine every 10th frame being darker in one eye). Its very good to still see this stuff around.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I bought 2 sets of wireless LCD shutter glasses when I bought a TNT2 card from Elsa a few years ago. The most important thing with these is to ensure your monitor can do at least 100 hz refresh at the resolution you want. Any less will give you flicker and headaches. Personally I run most things at 800x600@140 hz and 1024x768@110 hz. The resolution isn't as nice as 1600x1200 but the immersion of being "there" is worth it.
Make sure your room is dark as any other light will make your eyes go goofy, especially the flicker you'll see with 60Hz fluorescent tubes.
nVidia now has native drivers for their cards and the old Elsa glasses work great with my new(er) GeForce 2 card. The older Elsa drivers and the new nVidia ones just use a DX &| GL hack to shift the axis of your eyes every other frame so the appropriate eye is blocked by the LCD during drawing.
They're the best thing for gaming, IMHO.
Trolling is a art,
I bought a set of Elsa Revalator glasses a while ago that use the same basic lcd shutter technology. They do "work" but the effect is underwhelming. You can't really use them for any First Person Shooter games because the crosshairs on your screen are also adjusted for each eye and the real impact point will be directly between them. Also, many games mix solids with planes, so for example the hallway will look 3-D but all the people in it will look like flat carboard cut-outs. The road will be 3-d but all the trees on the side will be flat. It turned out to be a far LESS immersive experience. I played with it for a couple days, then packed it away with other unused computer junk.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Powerbook uses lcd technolgy for its display. LCDs cannot display the alternating frames for each eye properly and the effet is lost.
Sorry no 3d glasses for the powerbook.
I have some glasses from Elsa which work great. The arms are designed to stay well away from your head so the arms of your regular glasses dont interfere. Unless your lenses are the big goofy ones worn in the 80's these types of glasses should fit over them well.
Trolling is a art,
Got a wireless pair, and I have to say that they are the best 3d glasses out there for that price. I have tried several other shutter glasses, such as the crystaleyes, polarised projectors with polarised glasses, stereo projectors (SGI reality theatre type of systems)and so on and they are pretty god for what the price....the screensaver that comes as a demo it's pretty impressive and playing few games it's quite good, although the trick is to set everything to the highest framerate as possible (120 hz so each eye get 60 Hz) and switch the lights off if you can.
Make sure that the games are enable to support hight refresh rate (such as in quake to have something like seta v_refreshrate "120" or whatever the comand is.
The stereo effect depends In think of how the game/environment is design. Some games might work better than others, specially if they have artifacts that are extended or connected somehow from the foreground to the background (a wall, road, etc) or objects very close to your viewpoint (such as the gun that you carry in quake or others fps)
My gfx card (an asus TI4400 deluxe) comes with 3d glasses as well, but they are not as good as these ones and they are wired......
We have the crystal eyes as well (not sure which model). We made an extension cable for them as our app required to project from a huge sony 3 cannon projector (not sure the model). Out of 9 pins I think that the crystal eyes connector had, only 2 were active (1 ground and the other one goes on and off). The glasses had only one sensor (an infrared reader). On the contrary, the edimensional have a 3 pin connector and seems that 1 is ground and the other two are for the left and right eye. The edimensional seems to have two sensors, one per eye.
In terms of visuals, the quality of the edimensional seems to be better, as far as I remember, but we might have a low crystal eyes model, I'm not sure. In terms of physical design, the crystal eyes look/feel/fit better than the edimensional...
The model of crystal eyes I think that works at the output of the vga, by creating 2 images and flicking them on and off. The edimensional seems to work at the gfx card level (nvidia stereo drivers), but I'm not really sure
...there's a much cheaper option. nVidia provides drivers that will render scenes in full-color anaglyph so you can dig out your old red/cyan glasses and run the latest 3d (and oldest) 3d games in real 3d. The drivers work for any program that does the 3d math correctly in opengl or direct3d. I have yet to come across a program that doesn't work with them.
Sure, the image looks a little funky, and the framerate is half what it normally is, but you get this with any 3d scheme that uses a normal crt monitor. The glasses they talk about in this article also effectively halve the frame rate by halving the refresh rate per eye so you'll have to deal with quite a bit of flicker. Unless you can run your monitor at 1024x768 @ 120Hz vertical refresh, be prepared to run at lower resolutions. Oh yeah: page flipping 3d doesn't work very well with lcd monitors, so if you have a flat screen you're out of luck unless you want to go anaglyph.