Well, I’ve had the glasses for some time, but now I have the driver/adapter thing to connect them to the PC! And, since I now have two pairs, all I need is a headphone splitter to allow two people to see the stereo goodness! (Or, I could save one for when the other gets worn out…)
The set I got is called the H3D Terminator. I hope it has decent software support… For some reason, it seems like there are more shutter-glasses standards than there are shutter-glasses companies 😛
I can test out the shutter glasses mode of the PVB3 stereo screen-shot applet and Reality Boy! And I’ll be all set when Parasyte implements a “Virtual Boy Color” system in VUE32 😉
Oh… sorry, that was two different discussions. I was just commenting on how some N64 games have the depth inverted (which of course doesn’t matter since it was never meant to be seen in real 3D), so the clouds are really close, and the character is sunk into the ground. The problem is that it seems like the interface (life, points, etc) is always correct, so when you make the rest of the game correct, the interface looks wrong. Pilotwings 64 looks REALLY good though 🙂 .
The second question was about actually programming something to use shutter glasses. Like I said, I’ve done OpenGL stuff, and it’s in 3D, but do you know anything about controlling the shutters manually from a program (like talking directly to the nVidia driver to control the shutters)? I think it’d be cool to be able to add 3D to some programs, but not redo them with OpenGL or DirectX. Also, I believe the driver just looks at the depth buffer and adjusts the offset of the images, so we couldn’t actually give a different image for each eye.
I think if I could manually control the DDC pin of the video card, I could do it, although I’m not sure if there’s some special sequence that controls it. I read somewhere about writing 0x3F to the CRTC register to control the DDC pin, although I haven’t looked into that yet. I do know that the glasses start flickering when I turn my monitor on, I assume that’s because the it’s sending it’s info across the DDC pin, and the glasses are picking it up.
Or, maybe I’ll just hack a cable for the parallel port since I can program that easily :p .
Like I said, I’ve done OpenGL stuff, and it’s in 3D, but do you know anything about controlling the shutters manually from a program (like talking directly to the nVidia driver to control the shutters)?
Sorry, I don’t.
My programming knowledge stopped somewhere between QuickBasic and some other versions of basic compilers (Dark Basic, etc.).
I am not a computer programmer, but a doctor (:-).
I think it’d be cool to be able to add 3D to some programs, but not redo them with OpenGL or DirectX.
I am afraid that would not be possible (and I am saying that without the programming knowledge, but having knowledge about the way 3D works).
Why? Because the entire concept of 3d vision is based on having a different picture for the left eye, from the right eye. Unless that is somehow present, there can be no 3d. Some of the old PC games (Descent), all the Virtual Boy games were originally written in such a way, that both the left eye picture, as well as the different right eye picture was included in the programs.
The OpenGL and DirectX works differently, but still provides a separate left-right eye picture. How? Well, the programs are written in such a way, that what you see on the screen, within the program itself, contains the three dimensional coordinates for every pixel on the otherwise two dimensional screen. The stereo driver “grabs” those coordinates and mathematically calculates a left eye viewpoint and a right eye viewpoint, then creates a separate picture for each. Which then being flashed on the screen alternately (page flipping) and blocks the view by the other eye via the LCD shutterglass. That way the left eye and the right eye can see the appropriate picture for each eye.
There can be no programming trick (or even hardware trick) which can substitute the generation of the separate left-right eye picture. Because that what makes 3d what it is, 3d.
Yeah, I’m talking about making 3D programs, but manually creating the left/right images and switching the shutter glasses directly from the program. I decided to rip apart the glasses controller and add inputs, so I’ll rig up an adapter for the parallel port and see how it works. One thing I’d like to do is add shutter glasses support to a VB emulator… I’ve already added the image switching, but I need to sync the shutters to the screen. I was thinking I may be able to do it in OpenGL, but I don’t think there’s a way for me to manually control the left and right buffers, I think the shutter glasses driver recalculates the viewpoint automatically 🙁 .
