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Remember watching movies with those red/blue cellophane glasses? Movies where they would inevitably use cheap gags to make things “poke out of the screen” at you? Well, that was an inexpensive, decidedly low-quality form of stereoscopic 3D. We see the world in 3D because our left and right eyes see slightly different views, and our brain combines them to form a 3D image.
If you can use a TV, movie theater screen, PC monitor, or projector to show a left eye view only to the left eye and a right eye view only to the right eye, you can fool the brain into seeing that 2D flat plane as if it was 3D.
Things have come a long way since those early red/blue glasses. Some theaters project both the left and right eye image onto the screen with polarization rotated 90 degrees. Viewers wear plastic glasses that are polarized such that only the light from the left eye projection goes through the left eyepiece, and only the right eye image goes through the right eyepiece.
It works pretty well, and the glasses are cheap, but none of us exactly have TVs, PC monitors, or projectors at home capable of the necessary polarized light emission.
20 years ago, Sega released a peripheral for their 8-bit gaming console (called the Sega Master System in North America) called the SegaScope 3D. A pair of big LCD shutter glasses plugged into the card slot on the console, and combined with a small selection of 3D game cartridges, you could play games in true 3D.
It took advantage of the fact that all TVs back then showed interlaced images—the right eye’s LCD shutters would close and the left eye’s shutters would remain open while one field was showing. When your TV drew the other field, they would flip.
The result was a true 3D appearance, but half the resolution. It worked great, and it was cheap, but taking a 60Hz interlaced image and flickering it down to 30Hz with LCD shutters makes your eyes tired in a hurry, and could even induce headaches if you played too long.
Nvidia now is bringing a similar technology to market with their GeForce 3D Vision kit. This pair of LCD shutter glasses is fundamentally the same technology we’ve had for those past two decades in the consumer space, but with several advancements. It only works with certain “3D ready” DLP TVs and new 120Hz PC LCD monitors. The glasses are smaller and lighter, and rechargeable so there’s no need for a cord. The faster refresh rate reduces eye strain.
Today we’ll examine the kit and see how far 3D has really come. Is it finally time to make the dive, or are there still too many drawbacks to stereoscopic 3D technologies? Continued…
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