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…

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.

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.

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.

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….