3d Glasses
 

After all I've read about sore eyes and headaches I bought some 3d glasses and all I can say is WoW. As long as the monitor can be set at 100Hrz or higher the image is perfectly clear. The glasses really bring things to life on many games but the Aquarium has some problems. The worst is flashing bands of image at both sides of the monitor. They don't take up alot of screen space but they are still annoying. Except for the bands it looks great. The glasses show you everthing. The fish are beautiful 3d and you can clearly see that the corals are flats positioned at different depths. I never noticed before how the fish allways swim across the screen but only in a narrow space of depth. They never swim away or toward you. In all the 3d apps I've tried the foremost limit of the 3d effect is the screen and the depth of the 3d effect goes into the screen. The drivers for the glasses include a small demo for testing the setup. The demo shows a hallway that goes into the screen maybe 10 feet or more with objects moving up and down the hallway. Some of the objects come right out of the screen surface and hover between you and the screen. It looks so real you can reach out and touch it. The top of my wish list would be a 3d version of Aquarium were your fish would do the same. Fish swimming out of the screen at you would be so cool. How about it ?

milo,

wait for the 3d background of the marine aquarium. We all hope that this will be the next project for Jim, after finishing the freshwater aquarium.

YT, I think Milo is yearning for a version where the 3D fish swim closer to you than inside the aquarium and actually obscures the view of the rest of the SSA. Knowing about Jim's aim for making the SSA as realistic as possible, I wouldn't get my hopes up to high though...

/Tiny 3D

TT, Yes your right. As the fish swim out of the monitor toward you they would get bigger and obscure the view. I relized from your post that this would look stupid without the 3d glases. SSA shows the view as seen from the outside of the glass of an aquarium. My wish is to show the view as if you were in the aquarium swimming with the fish. In a program optimized for 3d glasses the surface of your monitor is irrelevent. You wouldn't know it was there if weren't for the borders. It turns 3d graphics into virtual reality. Jim was nice enough to create a wide screen version for those of us that have a wide screen monitor (Thanks Jim!). Why not a version for 3d glasses. Maybe he could sell it as a demo to the companies that make the new 3d monitors that don't require any glasses.

whoppie!

Milo -

The apparent depth of the objects in a 3D scene is controlled be the drivers of the 3D glasses. The same goes for the overlap on the sides of the screen. The Revelators have an excellent utility for adjusting these and several other parameters, using the function keys. I personally like to set the max foreground to the surface of the screen (the image will always be clearest that way), and the max background to 12 inches into the monitor.

Having the fish or any other moving object floating in front of the monitor causes visual problems when the object goes off the side of the screen. It would often be gone for one eye, but still there for the other. Setting the front depth to the glass of the monitor and the side clipping to the edges of the screen eliminates this problem and gives the effect which I intended -- that the monitor really IS an aquarium.

Jim,

My glasses are from EDimensional and because I have a Nvida video card they recomend using Nvida's 3D drivers. The only controls are for refresh rate, gamma and stereo seperation. It was an impulse purchase. I can't complain though, they work great for games. SSA is the only app were I have this clipping problem. I understand what you mean about swimming off the screen, never the less while watching SSA with the glasses I wished a fish would swim out to me. I also understand the aquarium effect you wanted to create and of course you've succeded beatifully. I look forward to the forth comming 3d environment. How's it going?

While were're at it I have a second wish. SSA looks dark with my normal screen settings. My wish then is for a gamma control on your setup screen.

Speaking of the Revelators, for the life of me I cannot get them to operate correctly under XP. I've tried the nVidia drivers, but the hot key controls for activating 3D don't work and even though once in a while I get the proper 3D effect in the test screen, it just wont cooperate in any other app. I also tried out the Elsa drivers, but have the same issues.

Anyone else out there using the Revelators successfully with XP? How about you Jim, what OS are you using them with? They used to work fine for me under 98SE and I really miss the 3D aquarium.
Any input would be appreciated. :)

NVidia came out with special XP drivers, but I never got them to work. That was about a year ago, and I haven't tried them since.

That's what I was afraid of. I would hate to have to buy another pair of LCD glasses to replace my Revelators just because there's no driver support for XP. I hope this isn't the case, but I sort of feel like the Revelators have been abondoned, I hope I'm wrong.

ok, DL, I think you're suffering my same problem :)

It seems there're two kinds of revelators. The newest ones works great with nvidia drivers, the olders won't work. They will work for a while, stop working, and work as "in flashes".

The only thing I could do to avoid buying a new pair was registering a driver for them called VrcaddyXP. You can find info about it at their site, http://www.vrcaddy.com

Maybe where you live glasses will be cheaper than buying that program, but here in spain you have to order them from somewhere else (here it seems they're not selling fine, so nobody have them), and the cheapest pair glasses use to cost about 70-80 euros, included shipping&handling costs :(

Thanks for the suggestion hpman77, but I've actually been a registered user of VRCADDY for some time now. I thought about upgrading to VRCADDYXP when I upgraded my OS, but I had mixed results using their Win98 driver previously, so I opted to hold off for now. To date, the best luck I've had with any driver was the one for Win98 from Elsa, but their recent one has failed me. :(

yeah it seems they're leaving alone the nvidia driver, but it's a shame that driver won't work for not-so-old glasses :(

About mixed results, well, they work fine most of the time, but I've noticed slowdowns on many games when using them.
Another thing they should add is a laser pointer for 3d games, as it's terribly difficult to shoot an alien in front of you using the glasses and the inacurate 2d pointer to aim :(