Anyone going to go for the 3D thing?

[-silencer-]

One thing worth remembering is that this won't work well for multiboxing, each display'll have it's own perspective and the brain won't like having six diifferent perspectives messing up things, at best it'll look like each of the characters is in their own artificially foreshortened box.. the normal 3d problem of the screen having a different a different perspective to the real-world is bad enough but give it five display regions and watch the brain trickle slowly out of your nose.

With regard to what happens when looking at a normal flatscreen 60Hz display in 120Hz goggles- the answer is not much, if anything it dims it a little. What's actually happening is you're just seeing the one frame either first through one eye then through the other (if the goggles sync with the display properly- not guaranteed), or through one eye, then the other, then back to the first for a moment before the frame switched. An old CRT viewed through this could be curious though, it may well make the point where the raster scan operation was very obvious- may have to have a play with that.

Personally I'm going to leave this technology alone at playtime for now. Whilst the problem of getting viable 3d displays working with games is a lot easier than it is with film it is still the case that most of the programmers won't really understand the requirements of making psychologically-acceptable 3d where the separation between the two virtual cameras is right based on the content to avoid either nullifying the 3d effect or making massive things look tiny, things don't appear too close to the camera and break the effect, and a number of other things.

This is ignoring also the fact that a lot of modern games use billboard techniques as imposters and they won't work- you're not looking at a lot of individually rendered blades of grass, you're looking at a much lower number of flat billboards with multiple blades of grass rendered on them; you're not looking at true smoke or fire, you're looking at a lot of flat billboards with a smoothly-faded blurred shapes on them. These kind of tricks work well in the forced-perspective of a single view but would rapidly start to break down in a stereoscopic environment as the edges either get quite obvious or the entire thing looks flat. Getting rid of these and replacing them with actual geometry/volumetrics is going to cost a lot of GPU power.

This has little to do with programmers. DX9 already supports the tech and the programmers don't have to do anything. The *only* thing that has to be done is for the "camera point" to be split into two, and moved 4-5" away from each other - this is all done by enabling 3D in the API, not by programmers writing new code. Then two frames are rendered based on these two cameras.. the "left" and "right" eyes. The shutter glasses are sync'd to the monitor, which alternates between these two camera at each Hz. That's why 120Hz monitors = 60 fps with shutter glasses.

We're writing programs that are 3D-enabled at work.. nothing "new" needs to be done on our side to be able to fully enjoy this technology. About the only thing we need to do is avoid sprite-based graphics (the billboarding you mentioned), which is outdated anyway. It helps to have everything rendered in 3D - gui, HUD, etc. We're using particle system and shader fire/explosion effects and they look awesome in 3D. Anyway, a sprite-based HUD doesn't look bad though - it looks like a picture frame hung 3 feet from your face, but the 3D effects happen both behind, through, and in front of it.

Also, LCDs don't "dim" like CRTs do.. the Hz with LCDs is how many times per second the screen will refresh, but there's no dimming after each refresh. That's why 60Hz LCDs look clean and clear with no flickering in comparison to 60Hz CRTs. When attempting to use multiple monitors, this technology would be VERY difficult to do because the shutter glasses can only by sync'd to one monitor, and getting the monitors sync'd is close to impossible. Until there's an option on the monitors to sync with another, I don't see multi-monitor 3D being supported any time soon.

[heffner]

I just got an email from Nvidia saying it's available for sale now.

Never even heard of it until today. Looks interesting. WoW was listed under the "excellent" rating for 3D Vision ready games too! Gah, Ijust bought a third monitor the other day too.....

Whoever tries this, let us know how it goes.

[Maxion]

If only this worked with my Vuzix Glasses.

[Hor]

Bit-Tech.net did a good review on the new 3D stuff
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/gra...ision-review/1

[mikekim]

I am looking into getting a couple of sets of these for the gaming PC's I have to support for work (It's a hard life sometimes :thumbup: )
not using the supplied 22" screen, as we use 30" atm -- probably look at using a 120Hz 1080P lcd around the 40-50" size

[Vicker]

This technology has been out for years now. About four years ago I bought a set of eDimensional 3d glasses for the purpose of playing fps. It worked quite nicely with my 85 Hz monitor with America's Army and Call of Duty. It was fun for a while, and was enough of a novelty that everyone on my floor in my dorm wanted to have a turn trying it out on my computer. I also used it with Eve for a while. It was pretty cool to be able to see my rifter floating in front of me in 3d. Eventually the novelty wore off and I stopped using them. I got too lazy to want to have to take the glasses on and off every time I got up from my computer to do something else.

Also, I should point out that it adds some more load to your video card. Rendering the world for the second eye is almost as video intensive as running a second copy of the game.

[Fef]

We use 3D display here at work all the time (pharmaceutical research). We have tested all TFT solutions until now, but none was satisfying. So people still use CRT screen with very high refresh rates. Yes, they are getting harder and harder to find, and they take a whole lot of room ...

120 MHz means that each eye actually sees a 60MHz display. A lot of people (including me) cannot stand that in the long term (say more than half an hour). So if you are interested by this technology, I would advise to try it during a significant amount of time, not just for two "wow that's cool" minutes.

[Multibocks]

I believe you mean 60Hz and 120Hz =)

[Ken]

I used these glasses about 8 years ago, I had 2 pair of them. My first impressions were that it was quite awesome, but after longer usage it starts to get very tiring for your eyes. Also, 60Hz is by itself not very relaxing for your eyes. An additional point is that most people these days don't by CRT screens anymore and that many CRT screens don't support their highest resolutions at their highest frequencies.

So in short: It looks very good, but it's too tiring for your eyes for serious(longer) usage.

[Freddie]

A question for the folks who use 3D at work. How much of the strain is due to strobe effects from artificial lights? I'm wondering if the strain can be eliminated 100% for everyone if there is no artificial light.