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How Nvidia Wants To Bring 3D Glasses Back
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."
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.
But you'll appreciate how that BSOD really pops out of the screen in 3D. Or the progress bar while waiting for file copies.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Someone is going to create a way to convert standard porn to 3D and then these things will really take off.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
tfa: Right now, we do not have OpenGL support but will be working to release it soon
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?
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.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
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.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
I'm not sure I have nerve to play Angband with this anyway -- those capital Z's will be terrifying in 3D!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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.
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?
no matter what you religious stance is
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.
I'm a big tall mofo.
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.
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make install -not war
While you can't polish a turd, you can roll it in glitter!
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 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!"
"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)
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
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.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.