Reach out and Touch

Picked up a pair of 3D Stereo LCD shutter glasses (Elsa Revelators) from eBay for the princely sum of £5. These were all the rage about 5 years ago but never really took off. Part of the reason was poor support from the games of the time, poor drivers and limited hardware support. Allied to the fact that many people found their use promoted nausea and blurred vision it's not really surprising they failed.

Nvidia now have better support with dedicated Stereo drivers so I thought I'd take the plunge and snap up a bargain for a looksee. I should receive them next week and I'll write further on them then.

My Quadro FX1000 has a dedicated Stereo port on the back next to the twin DVI-D ports and as the card supports very high refresh rates (the use of stereo effectively halves the monitor refresh rate so you really need a minimum of 120hz) it should ease the problems of flickering images that dogged their use five years ago.

As I don't really play games as such my interest will be seeing how they work with the realtime architectural walkthroughs I've been creating with Blender recently. I'm currently working on a much more complete demo of the software's capabilities and hope to post it soon. Blender can output Anaglyph Stereo (red/blue glasses) realtime games but after about 30 seconds of use I was close to throwing up, very unsettling. The stereo effect was limited to say the least so I've struck that off my list of options.

Category: 3D