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Stereoscopic history, the last 10 years (Part II)

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

Nowadays everyone is talking about stereo 3D and it seems that finally it is about time for the technology to become mainstream and everybody to have some sort of 3D products available at home, and not to see 3D just at the cinema anymore. Of course it will take at least a few more years in order for the 3D to become widely adopted and become mainstream, but the good thing is that we are seeing a lot of efforts being put to promote the technology. And although we already have quite a lot of products on the market and more are soon to become available, we still have some issues regarding interoperability and of course the lack of a lot of content in 3D. But in order for you to better understand what problems we are currently facing in 3D technology and the already available implementations we should go back at the beginning of this century and take a look at what happened in the last 10 years. If you haven’t read the first part of the post about stereoscopic history, starting from its beginning probably sometime around 300th year B.C. up until its recent development at around the end of the last century you should do so…

old-nvidia-stereo-3d-driver
Last time we finished talking about NVIDIA starting to develop interest in Stereo 3D technology and especially for PC gaming and of course acquiring some of the team that worked on the Wicked3D product over at Metabyte. And probably somewhere around 2001 NVIDIA already had an additional stereo 3D driver to go along with the Forceware drivers designed for the company’s GPUs. The stereo 3D driver had to be additionally installed after the GPU driver in order for the functionality to support anaglyph and page flipping stereo 3D support to be added as an option. These drivers worked for the TNT, TNT2 and Vanta as well as GeForce, GeForce 2 and 3 and of course the professional Quadro graphic solutions being made by NVIDIA back at that time. It is interesting to note that even back then NVIDIA was thinking about the use of stereo 3D not only for gaming, but also in the professional field for users that need to have more realistic 3D visualizations in their workflow. And now years later that way of thinking still haven’t changed as with its new 3D Vision product NVIDIA still supports both the consumer GeForce and the professional Quadro users in their need for stereo 3D visualization. In time NVIDIA continued to improve the support of their drivers and even added support for additional hardware like HMD devices (Head Mounted Displays) and in the following few years the NVIDIA Stereo 3D driver became the most used and relied on solution for different type of products that support 3D visualization. So you could not only use the cheap paper anaglyph red-cyan glasses on your normal monitor (CRT displays at that time) or a pair of more expensive LC shutter glasses that also worked with CRT monitors, but required higher refresh rate models to work without noticeable flickering. At that time NVIDIA had no competition in the area of stereo 3D for gaming and the PC gaming was booming with a lot of interest in further development of the immersion while playing games. But then again stereo 3D was still far from becoming a mainstream technology and was still more like an enthusiasts and early adopters thing.

crt-vs-lcd-monitors
Now if you think back about displays and how they developed in the last 10 years or so you’ll immediately think of the evolution of going from the big and bulky CRT monitors to the more compact LCD displays. You can say that on the desktop segment this has started somewhere around 2001, but at first the prices of the LCD monitors were quite high and they had some issues and were not performing as good as CRTs in a lot of aspects. But in just one year the LCD display prices have dropped in half and while still they were still quite expensive, they were getting more and more attention from the customers. The technology behind LCD monitors was also quickly catching up while the prices were going down, so in just a few years the LCD monitors were starting to replace more and more the old CRT technology. And if you are wondering why that is important, then you should be aware of the fact that the first major push of having better stereo 3D experience (better than the anaglyph solutions that were available for years) using liquid crystal shutter glasses has relied heavily on the technology behind the way CRT monitors have worked and especially their ability to function with higher refresh rates like 100Hz or even more. With the LCDs running at 60Hz this has become a problem that lasted for a few years and just recently we had the first 120Hz LCD monitor on the market by Samsung and after that followed by ViewSonic, Acer and Alienware with more to soon follow.

nvidia-geforce-3d-vision
But because of the LCD monitor invasion in around 2004-2007 NVIDIA kind of left behind a bit the support for stereo 3D as the interest in the technology has also gone down, or so it seemed to the normal users. There were no updates for the stereo 3D drivers for quite some time and the new GPUs and technologies like multi-core CPUs were not supported by the old drivers. That kind of disappointed a lot of the enthusiasts that had a bit more specific and quite expensive hardware like 3D-capable HMDs that cost them hundreds and even thousands of dollars to buy as they were no longer usable in 3D mode. But in reality NVIDIA was kind of busy working on alternative solution to offer stereoscopic 3D gaming with the new hardware available and on an LCD monitor and the result in 2008 was the introduction of their partnership with Zalman and their Trimon series of passive polarized 3D monitors. But at about that time (around 2007) other companies also started working on providing the users with stereoscopic 3D solutions mainly targeted at gaming, but also supporting videos and photos in 3D format and these are iZ3D and DDD or Dynamic Digital Depth. iZ3D has introduced their own unique approach by creating a specific dual LCD panel monitor with stereo 3D support and the software to go with it, but after that their driver was even further developed to offer support for other 3D solutions too. DDD and their TriDef solution was more targeted at passive polarized solutions, but has also been expanded to support other stereo 3D solutions. And later in 2008 NVIDIA has surprised us yet again with the announcement of their new product called GeForce 3D Vision that was actually a pair of LC shutter glasses that were capable of working with the new 120Hz LCD monitor announced by Samsung and also of course with CRT displays and 3D-capable 120Hz DLP projectors and 3D-ready DLP TVs. It seemed again that Nvidia foresaw the growing interest in stereo 3D and was starting to push the technology more seriously yet again and that happened even before Avatar made its huge success. In 2009 even AMD (ATI) has started talking more seriously about stereo 3D, although they were partnering more silently with companies like iZ3D even before that. You should know that the NVIDIA stereo 3D solutions are designed to work only on the company’s GPUs, whereas the solutions provided by iZ3D and DDD are multifunctional, meaning that then can work on both NVIDIA and AMD (ATI) hardware and why not even others.

sony_bravia_3d-hdtv
In 2009 everyone was beginning to talk a lot about the bright future of stereo 3D technology, more and more companies were starting to get interested in it and were working hard to prepare different products. On the 3D-capable TV market the company Mitsubishi has been the pioneer already offering a big portfolio of 3D-ready DLP HDTVs and continuing to improve and develop their product line with other brands like Samsung for example just kind of trying out with one or two products to test the market. But the real boom in the interest about everything 3D was going on around the 3D movie by James Cameron called Avatar and when it finally premiered in cinema in December 2009 it immediately became a huge hit. Then after that during CES 2010 at the beginning of this year it was almost all about 3D technology with a lot of companies showing their upcoming next generation of 3D-capable TV sets, talking about the future of in-home 3D with Blu-ray 3D and so one. And now, with some of the first 3D HDTV and Blu-ray 3D products already on the market and more expected in the summer we are finally facing one serious issue that was kind of expected all along. We already have 3D-capable hardware and more is soon to come, but we are still lacking the more important component and that one is the 3D content to see on this new hardware. This is the reason why some companies like Sony are not in a hurry to have their 3D-ready BRAVIA HDTVs on the market as they say they want to not only give you the hardware, but to also provide some content to watch on it in 3D. But let me get back to the PC and the games available for it as they are actually a quite important factor when we are talking about 3D content. You see, actually on the PC we do have a lot of 3D content already available – almost all of the games are actually capable to be displayed quite well in stereo 3D mode with the right software solution like 3D Vision, iZ3D or DDD TriDef. And on a computer that has some sort of a stereo 3D setup you do have a lot of content already available in terms of games and you can enjoy it even at this very moment, so the question that rises here is why not play the same content on the 3D HDTV? Well, here comes the other issue, although the new wave of 3D-capable TV sets relies on the HDMI 1.4(a) specification and more specifically the stereo 3D features defined in it, there are still a lot of things left non-standardized. So at this time you cannot easily connect your PC to the new 3D-ready TV and play 3D content on it from the PC and this kind of sounds stupid, right? I mean you would expect to be able to take advantage of the most widely available stereo 3D content you currently have (the computer games), but in the end you still can’t. Now, NVIDIA is working on a solution called 3DTV Play that will allow people to connect their PCs with their new 3D TV sets and play games on the big screen in stereo 3D pretty soon….

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Stereoscopic history, at the beginning (Part I)

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

The beginning, well you can say that the beginning of stereoscopy dates back to about the 300th year B.C. (hard to say exactly when) when the Greek mathematician Euclid found out how we humans achieve the depth perception of the world around us. His findings revealed that the depth we perceive is being achieved by our eyes simultaneously receiving two almost exact images, but with a little bit of difference in the perspective. But this was just the beginning, understanding how our eyes work, then during the Renaissance there was also a lot of development about the illusion of depth and how it can be achieved with the help of drawings and paintings. But until the year 1838-39 and the work of the English scientist Charles Wheatstone you can say that things were developing quite slowly, as then he patented and demonstrated his work in the stereoscopic 3D field. Wheatstone has started working a few years before that on a device that he called a reflecting stereoscope or just a stereoscope – a device that allowed two different drawings to be simultaneously viewed by each eye and thus the illusion of real depth was being achieved. Back at that time they still used two drawings with a little bit different perspective and two mirrors to reflect them and position the two images so that the viewer can simultaneously see them.

old-s3d-camera-anaglyph

Some years later, still in the 19-th century, the stereoscope was further developed and with the photography starting to gain a lot of interest among the general public, the first stereoscopic cameras were being made. Around 1850 was the first period in time when the stereoscopic photography has gained a lot of interest and thanks to that a lot of people had stereoscopes to view such photographs at home. Around that time the anaglyph stereoscopic process has also been discovered and in the 1850s the first anaglyph images and anaglyph glasses (red-green filters at first) using different color filters were developed. And you probably thought that the anaglyph stereoscopic 3D is a fairly new technology? We skip a few more years in the history until the 1890s when the interest in stereoscopy has yet again started to boom thanks to the appearance of the first anaglyphic stereo 3D movies (black and white of course, yet too early for color) and that has continued into the early 20th century. The next big moment for stereoscopy, we are still talking about movies as they were the main driving force for stereoscopic development at that time, was in 1950s. New and improved stereoscopic cameras were being developed for stereo photography at that time, and the first solutions using polarization filters (thank Polaroid for that) allowed full color reproduction with depth perception, thus becoming the preferred method, instead of using the older anaglyph method (still anaglyph did not die). Then another comeback in the 80s and with IMAX introducing its first 3D system things for stereoscopic 3D yet again started to heat up, but still not a lot of hit movies were produced in stereoscopic format which was a serious problem.

You can say that the next big thing about stereoscopic 3D started in the mid 90s of the 20th century, a time when personal computers started to get a lot of attention especially for gaming and the 3D graphics they offered was getting better and better. Back at that time everyone was talking about virtual reality and there were some companies interested in making stereoscopic 3D games, allowing the games to actually have the perception of true depth while they play. This however proved to be a hard task for everyone, but things started to change at the end of 1998, when a company called Metabyte has announced their first stereoscopic 3D gaming solution called Wicked3D. What they did was to provide not only a hardware in the form of active shutter glasses (allowing the user to see different frames with each of the eyes), but also to release an universal so to say driver that could turn hundreds of normal 3D games into stereoscopic 3D games. Prior to that every game developer had to work out some sort of a stereoscopic 3D support for his own game and with the Wicked3D that was no longer needed. Originally all 3D games do have all the needed information for being displayed in stereoscopic 3D, as there is all the needed depth information, what was lacking was the software that will allow the graphics in the game to be rendered twice with a little difference in the perspective so that when perceived by the user the depth effect will be present. At that time you had to use CRT display with a high refresh rate, because by using active shutter glasses you to have to show twice as much frames on the screen as you’d normally do and the job of the glasses is to separate them for each eye. A monitor capable of at least 85Hz, preferably 100Hz was required in order to have 40-50 frames per eye with no noticeable flickering as this is a side effect when quickly making one lens of the glasses dark and then switching it to the other. This is the exact principle that the shutter glasses use in order to achieve stereoscopic 3D depth effect with a single display and not with two separate small displays as most advanced head mounted display solutions use. The things continued to develop further three years later when NVIDIA has developed a serious interest into stereoscopic 3D gaming and has acquired the team responsible for Wicked3D at Metabyte. But we’ll talk about NVIDIA and what happened in the lets say last 10 years of quite active stereoscopic 3D development in the next article when we continue the stereoscopic story…

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