Slashdot Mirror
NVIDIA Offers 3D Glasses For the Masses
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."
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.
Just wait until someone figures out how to make them wireless. 3D mobile porn while driving...
You're nothing; like me.
Does it come with Aspirin?
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
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.
Trolling is a art,
Who thought of selling a 3d display system for gaming?
Let's see. How many gamers watch porn regularly?
Now, how many non-gamers watch porn regularly?
And finally, how many games get so greater for being in 3d as porn?
How hard can it be to sell a product with "Full 3D titties. $X. Pay here."
How hard? I ask you.
So, I definitely want one, but I'm not going to pretend that this would be remotely useful until I upgrade to a brand new machine.
Well, you could buy it now and, while you wait for a more powerful rig, use it on older games.
Like tetris.
Seems like those glasses would not fit over mine. So I guess this product is going purely for the good vision and contact lens market?
The glasses work great. Any direct3D will show in full 3D. The only reasons I don't wear them all the time (or ever really) are bad 3d driver support from nvidia in the past, and more importantly, every game I've ever played in 3D has used some weird visual shortcuts for displaying explosions or gunshots or something that breaks the whole immersion. For example, in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, it's all full 3D except the streetlights and headlights. Those appear to be painted on a 2D window in front of you because they don't really appear in the 3D space. Anyway, it's weird enough to make me not want to play it that way. So if this is going to ever work in the mainstream, game developers have to meet halfway and stop using graphical shortcuts like that.
Nothing new. I got these with my Asus V7700 GFX card (a very good card, btw!) - but they had a cable rather than wireless sync. The GFX card had an extra connector for these. The glasses worked but needed calibrating and were a guarantee for headache after playing for 10 minutes or so. But Dark Reign 2 and simular games looked really cool with them. For 3D RTS I think something like this can even give you an advantage - if you can raise your monitor refresh rate enough, that is.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
... I expected the Slashdot story to be something like:
3 young lasses from Manassas made glasses for the masses rendering 3d in two passes. Currently the glasses are omitting noxious gasses and they're receiving an action lawsuit in classes so they really need to cover their asses.
more as time passes.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
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
So will graphic clipping issues poke you in the eye?
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.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
$199 according to Nvidia's website. Can't find them for sale anywhere else. I'd be willing to try them for half that, but I'll have to hold off for now.
mmmm...forbidden donut
After reading the article, I notice they make mention that this works by utilizing data provided from Direc3D....does anyone know if this works with OpenGL-based games as well?
But a new and more likely useful implementation. First off it's wireless which makes them much more practical for general use. The big deal these days is the faster monitors. Back when they first came out, you had to use them CRTs, LCDs were too slow. However even good CRTs had real hell doing refresh rates high enough not to produce severe flicker. 85Hz was fine for a normal image, too slow for this sort of thing to work well. It took a top of the line CRT to do 120Hz at even 1024x768.
Well that's not a problem now. DLP screens update way, waaaaaay, faster. They cycle colours thousands of times per second. So doing 120Hz, or rather 60Hz per eye, is no problem at all.
Nothing revolutionary, but it is practical now. I remember playing with it when it first came out. It was kinda cool, but not all that usable and only really worked when I tried it on a professional CRT at work. This sounds like I could make it work in my living room on a normal DLP screen.
Well, except that some of us can still see the 60Hz flicker. I want to gouge my eyes out looking at anything less than 75Hz, which would work out to 150Hz combined for this technology.
To understand why this may be a poor choice for 3D glasses technology for consumers, as well as some thoughts on why NVIDIA might have gone with it anyways, here's an article that gets into the nitty gritty. Brief summary; headaches and batteries.
(Insert usual disclaimer about the Inquirer not exactly being an enthusiastic supporter of NVIDIA here..)
I've owned and used heavily 2 stereoscopic 3d systems.
One used a large CRT monitor that could run at 150Hz. I had two different 3d shutter glasses I used. I remember having to do quite a bit of tweaking with each game I wanted to play, but eventually I was able to get 'perfect' effects that were completely and totally awesome.
You can't really know til you try it, but 3d can make games feel dramatically more real. It can make even older games look a LOT better. Deus Ex was pretty darn awesome looking when your weapons actually have depth to them, and so do the enemies.
I then built a passive stereoscopic rig using polarized glasses and 2 LCD monitors, as well as a half-silvered mirror. Total cost : about $650. That one also ruled, and worked better than the shutter glasses. I found that the killer app game for it was World of Warcraft.
This was 18 months ago : I was playing WoW in full 3d. I had to disable just 1 effect to get it to work perfectly, all of the time, smooth as glass. Again, a lot of the graphics of that game look amazing when they have depth, because your brain automatically fills in details that aren't really in the low detail graphics.
Why did I quit? Time, and the fact that Nvidia basically abandoned stereo 3d for a while. My 8800GT did not work at all for a long time. Stereo 3d IS worth it, but it requires heavy driver support or it doesn't work.
Also, I never could eliminate "ghosting". That is where the images from one eye leak into the other. One game in particular, a horror game, was AWESOME and VASTLY more scary with depth. The problem was, the dark shadows and flashlights would create various halos on the screen from ghosting which was very unrealistic and distracting.
Ghosting is inherent to shutter glasses. The only 3d tech that completely eliminates it is a headset with a separate display for each eye. However, no affordable, high resolution headsets are available on the market today. (and when I say affordable, I mean for any reasonable price. You cannot get a high resolution head mounted display for even $2000)
"a33s3s" aeeses? asssss?
"This thing does science so hard, you say, 'I've never seen that much science.'" -Sam
Why did I quit? Time, and the fact that Nvidia basically abandoned stereo 3d for a while.
That's the problem. They always do. 3D glasses have been in and out of favour with manufacturers for years and years. They keep trying it, and then giving up. Maybe it's just too invasive to require people to use special glasses, but for whatever reason it never seems to catch on.
I remember that the Sega system had 3D glasses. I think there were about 2 games for them. I even bought (and still have) a pair for my Amiga computer. I literally only ever used them with the demo game that came with them. Nothing else was available, as far as I could tell.
Even earlier, stereoscopic movies were made in the 50's. It also turned out to be nothing but a passing fad.
I think stereoscopic vision adds a really cool level of detail to the 3D experience. Combine it with head tracking for *truly* impressive results. But unless the industry gets its act together and actually produces games and applications that use them, this technology will forever be doomed to last about a week and then disappear.
Maybe this time around it will be different: At least at this point we have many more games and applications that are actually rendered in 3D, which is a significant difference from the state of computing circa 1995. And the level of detail and realism in 3D rendering has increased dramatically. We also have operating systems that fully utilize 3D technology for day-to-day interaction, which might have interesting uses for depth perception.
Also, from a consumer point of view the glasses themselves seem to be quite a bit more stylish and less bulky, which should help quite a bit.
For those who say these will induce headaches: when I had the old glasses for the Amiga they refreshed at 30 Hz, alternating with the interlaced scanlines of the monitor display. Heck even just staring at a 30 Hz monitor without glasses will give you a headache. If these really update at 120 Hz, I don't think headaches will be a problem.
These aren't the kind of video glasses that display the image right in front of each eye - these are shutter glasses that alternately black out the left and right sides, synchronized with your monitor that's alternately showing right and left images.
So if you're walking around instead of looking at your monitor, unless the real world is blinking on and off in sync with your glasses, it'll just look a little dimmer. And if the real world *is* blinking on and off in sync with your glasses, you've found Owsley's Secret Lost Acid Stash... let me help you with that :-)
(My first question when reading the headline about new 3D glasses was to wonder what resolution they are, since I'm not happy reading text at less than 800x600, and most gamer glasses have been 640x200 or less, , but of course they don't work for that either, so no gargoyle mode for me yet.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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).
Free Martian Whores!
Not only is it $199 for the glasses, but you also need the following (according to NVIDIA's product page):
Gamespot has an article on these 3d glasses as well. One of the screenshots shows the 3d lenses fitting over a pair of standard eye glasses, so unless you have giant coke bottle glasses, you should be good to go.
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).
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
You don't need glasses and a computer for that in some places.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Someone said NVIDIA is making a winning bet, because video cards will now need to deliver much higher frame rates, and thus the specs required to play games comfortably will be even higher. This is true.
However, 120 Hz doesn't mean you need your game to render at 120 FPS. It simply means you need to be able to display 120 images per second (60 per eye per second). Most likely, the implementation will involve using two frame buffers in the video card instead of one. The video card will render one frame for each eye, at whatever pace it can sustain. This rendering process will be decoupled from the display subsystem, which will simply have to switch to display the proper image for each eye at the right time. If the video card can't render at 120 FPS, then the video card can simply alternate between the same pair of left-right images until a new pair of images is done rendering.
Anyways, this is just speculation, but obviously, while 120 FPS is hard to maintain constantly on modern games, 60+ FPS will be more feasible. Some people might also be willing to reduce their display resolution so they can get a good enough frame rate for 3D play to be comfortable.
because i am going to hook a gyroscope up to these glasses and interface them with my mouse. and then i am going to put myself in a hampster ball setup, also connected to my mouse/movement interface. ...and then i'm going to buy a Fleshlight...
Nvidia fucked over the consumer with these.
I've had a pair of shutter glasses (as have a hell of a lot of other people) for years. For years, I was a fan of Nvidia because they included shutter support in an add-on driver release. I played Portal with my original-series VRStandard glasses and it was AMAZING.
Six months ago, Nvidia entered into a monetary partnership with people who make some shitty, half-assed "3d compatible" lcd monitors. All of a sudden, the latest version of the add-on driver (a) is Vista-Only (fucking bullshit) and (b) dropped support for anything but anaglyph, these "3d compatible lcd monitors", or "official Nvidia shutter glasses."
I'm not about to infect my computer with the Vista Virus to have this, much less have to go spend money on buying more new hardware that, internally, is exactly the fucking same as I already own except for having the monitor-sync bit use a different one of the 14 VGA pins to hide its left/right signal.
Fuck Nvidia till they start putting the consumer first again. And if they don't fix this and give us back the driver support, then I won't buy their cards anymore.
This isn't a "review", this is a paid-for advert disguised as one.
A few examples:
Active glasses for stereo 3D viewing are not a technology created by NVIDIA and in fact they have been around for some time as well. However, the quality of the glasses and the user experience has been low due to low frame rates (30 Hz to each eye usually) and bulky hardware.
Reality: Existing glasses solutions (from companies like EDimensional and preceding them, VRStandard) are just as slim as the NVidia offering and run at the same framerate (100-120 Hz).
As of today, NVIDIA's 3D technology will work with only two types of displays: true 120 Hz LCD monitors and 3D-Ready DLP projection televisions.
That's only because Nvidia has a monetary interest in forcing people to buy new hardware; the old glasses solutions worked just fine with true 120-Hz monitors, DLP projection TV's, and even standard CRT monitors until recently when Nvidia deliberately broke the drivers and made 3D-support only available on Windows Vista.
I feel it is also important to realize that while the 3D effects we are seeing today are really cool and well worth the investment of $199,
A pair of EDimensional glasses six months ago ran you $60-80 depending on where you bought them, and were exactly the same technology inside; all NVidia's done is changed which pin they're hiding the monitor/glasses sync signal in on the video cable. Charging $200 is fucking highway robbery and they know it.
It's a pity that "PC Perspective" ran a shitty, paid-for "review" and are trying to fool everyone. I call Scam because I see one.
Yes, but you do need a girlfriend, and that's something a lot of us are lacking.
http://speedbandits.dk/
http://blog.nexusuk.org