Well, I avoid 3D like the plague. Think about it: What they are doing is taking a 3D image, putting it onto a 2D screen, then faking 3D. Am I the only person who realizes how stupid that is?
Make an actual 3D monitor, and find a way to send the actual 3D image across. Might as well skip rasterization entirely at that point...I see no reason to use "fake 3D".
Remember no such thing as a "3D image", an image by definition is flat and only two dimensional. For a long long time we've been capable of building virtual spaces that are represented in 3 dimensions, I used to mess around with VRML doing this. The problem is expressing that virtual space to the user. Monitors / Screens are flat surfaces, no mater how much magic you do they are only capable of rendering flat images. Any 3D world can thus only be expressed on a 2D screen, and it looks flat, very flat.
I know everyone keeps hearing it but very few actually understand the process that the human brain use's to synthesize a 3D image. You eyeballs can not "see" in 3D, they are just chemical photo-receptors that transmit light patters to the brain. It's the brain that takes the two sets of patterns, one from each eye, and use's that to synthesize what we call vision. When you pick up your morning coffee cup, your not seeing one cup, your actually seeing two completely different pictures and your brain is doing the crunching to make it into one. It's very important to realize this, the eye's are not what "sees" it's the brain that does it.
All "3D" does is express that 3D world as two different images and then send them to the appropriate eyes so that the brain can do what it was naturally designed to it. In a way "3D" is more natural then your bring taking a single 2D image and trying to extract depth information from it. Your brain will always recreate the visual space inside your head, when it only has a single flat image then the information its capable of extracting is very limited.
Now onto the devices themselves. The best way to experience true virtual reality is with a Head Mounted Display (HMD). This looks like a really goofy helmet that puts two high definition screens one to two inch's from your eyeballs and then calibrates the proper horizontal eye spacing from that. Two separate displays running simultaneously that are synched with the appropriate GPU's and creates a much better visual effect then anything else. Now that's expensive, ridiculously expensive, stupidly expensive. The XVR-1200 GPU that I have in my SUN system used to be what was used for that, that cared was $2500 back in 2005~2006 and you needed two of them to drive a single VR station. Typically the suites would cost $40~$50K for the "cheap" versions. Consumers can not afford those suites so various companies have been trying to create "poor man" versions of this for a long time. Nvidia was the one who finally standardized it, though in a proprietary way (which I don't like btw). LCD Shutter glass's are the next best thing to a full on VR suite with a HMD, they rely on switching from one eye to another but only require a single cheap consumer display and relatively cheap active glass's. Theaters can't very well be handing out high quality $100 glass's to every person, not to mention you have to worry about batterys or get some form of power wiring in place. Thus theaters opt to use the cheaper method of passive 3D, polarized glass's and special screens with two projectors. Glass's are cheap and easily maintained but the resolution of the 3D effect is horrible, its 50% of the projected resolution. A 1920x1080 hope setup would be an effective resolution of 1920x520 per eye, absolutely horrible.
I'm willing to bet money that you've never actually gamed on 3D for more then 10~15 min, then put it down and called it a day. Your experience would be limited to that crap they use in Theaters with movies that the 3D effect is either outrageously overdone or thrown on as an afterthought. Don't get me started into "2D->3D conversion" crap. When doing ~anything~ in 3D you need to start with the source material and a clear focus for it to be in 3D, otherwise you'll end up screwing the effect
up. 3D also takes awhile to get used to, and it's not something that can every be fixed without expensive HMDs. It's a rather deep discussion about eyeball separation, short part is it takes longer then 15m for your brain to unlearn 20~30+ years of your natural vision. After a week I found it comfortable to play games.
Problem with most of you gamers is your so used to playing console ports that you don't even realize how bad they were making them. A console port is almost impossible to get to work right with 3D vision, the developers used too many sprites, 2D overlay images and special effect cheats. It looks fine on a 2D display but the moment you try to create the 3D view you see how badly they programmed in the special effects. A game designed from the get go to be played on a 3D display will have all the info required for the 3D Vision drivers to generate the two images. Last night I loaded up Crysis Warhead (never finished it) and when I enabled 3D BAM ugly as sin. Game had FoV issues and shadows / lighting were horrible. Loaded up Crysis 2 and it looked much better. This is why Nvidia has that big list of games and how well they work with "3D", anyone that says 3D Vision Ready was made (or patched) with the intention of being displayed in 3D and avoids the cheats and short cuts that break it.
Anyhow I can go into a huge discussion about the finer points and techniques to get the proper effect. Two points I'll end with are that #1, if you haven't spent a large amount of time doing 3D (and not movies with crap effects) then you can't possibly know what your talking about. And #2 the effect is amazing when pulled off correctly, especially if you mix it with a 3D positional sound system. 3D is not a "fad" and it's not "going away" anytime soon. It's not a marketing gimmick and the people bashing it typically have absolutely no experience with it outside of 15m. It's the natural evolution of virtual reality. From 50K workstations to 1.5K home systems.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram