Active stereoscopic displays / shutter glasses

1

Has anyone here worked with active 3D displays recently? It seems “3D TVs” are mostly a thing of the past, and technologies such as NVIDIA’s 3D Vision (shutter glasses) are no longer readily available to purchase…

Just wondering if anyone can report from the trenches on doing installations or other Cinder work with stereoscopic displays (not VR/HMD). I’d prefer a monitor/TV solution (due to price), but mostly what I find that involves active glasses are 3D DLP projectors.

Any recommendations to share?

Thanks,
Glen.

2

I remember seeing a TV made by Philips on a show somewhere, which had special lenses built in. It displayed the same image from 9 or so different view points, transmitting the correct 2 images to your eyes, depending on where you were standing. Whether they are still available, what they’d cost and what it would mean to create content for them, I don’t know.

I own a 3D TV myself, since 2012 when they were the new hype. It uses shutter glasses. Quality is pretty good (120Hz, so 60Hz per eye) and only requires you to render your content side by side (so 960x1080 for the left eye and another 960x1080 for the right eye), which is easy if you use the CameraStereo class along with some OpenGL viewport magic.

That’s all I can tell you at the moment.

-Paul

3

Thanks, Paul, that’s helpful. I didn’t realize the technique was simply to render side-by-side in a single window…yes, that’s easy to do, though it’s too bad you lose half the horizontal resolution – I guess that’s due to the HDMI bandwidth.

But nowadays there aren’t really many 3D TVs or monitors available…the main stereoscopy choice today seems to be projectors. A relatively inexpensive option looks like maybe the Optoma HD143X (or HD144X). I’m still not totally clear on whether you simply need to buy compatible active shutter glasses, or also some “switching box” that handles the glasses synchronization (I notice a 3D sync port on the back). In the old days, shutter glasses were synchronized using an IR signal, but maybe the new “DLP Link” glasses use an RF signal? (Hmm, actually, it looks like they do it with some sort of “flash” that works when you’re looking at the projection itself).

Thanks again,
Glen.