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.

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…