Stereoscopic Glasses from Nvidia

Some of you might remember way back in the day when you could get the 3D VR glasses, like the ones packaged with a TNT2 Ultra from ASUS. They were pretty neat for their time, but by no means very good. They were troublesome to get working properly and game support was pretty flaky as well. Hence why they pretty much disappeared from the market shortly after. Good try right ?

Well Nvidia is bringing this whole idea back this year, hopefully with a much better experience for the user. Quoting and interview that Maximum PC recently had with Nvidia, we have the following direct response :

“The Nvidia GeForce Stereoscopic 3D driver works at the lowest level by taking 3D game data and rendering each scene twice – once for the left eye and once for the right eye. Each eye image is offset from each other for the correct viewing. The GPU then sends this data to a 3D Ready display. These displays show the left eye view for even frames (0,2,4,etc) and the right eye view for odd frames (1,3,5,etc). Nvidia 3D glasses then synchronize back to the 3D Ready display and present slightly different images to each eye resulting in the illusion of depth and an incredibly immersive experience for games.”

This new stereoscopic technology will be better experienced on displays with fast refresh rates (120Hz). So do not expect to get a really good experience from an out-dated display. Display factor aside, Andrew Fear – the product manager for the new technology, says you will need at least a GeForce 8800GT or better, a 32bit copy of Windows Vista (64bit support coming later) and of course a pair of Nvidia’s own stereoscopic 3D glasses.

Nvidia claims to have implemented a support library of over 350 existing DirectX 8,9 and 10 titles so far. However OpenGL games such as Quake 4 and Prey are not supported as of yet.

The glasses themselves should be shipping by the end of this year according to Andrew Fear. They’ll work wirelessly with a USB infrared transmitter and the built-in batteries should retain enough power for roughly 40 hours between charging. It sounds as though the glasses will use some type of built in shutter mechanism to shield each eye from even or odd frames.