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ISSUE 221 XMAS 2008
PERFORMANCE GEAR & GAMING
ISSUE 221 AND I’LL WHISPER ‘NO’
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Issue 221 Xmas 2008 £5.99 Outside UK & ROI £6.49
31/10/08 11:46:09
Tech Briefing
3D Monitors RELEASE OUT NOW
Dave James dusts off his cardboard glasses and delves eyes-first into the stereoscopic world of the 3D display
D
o you remember that first time you saw the shark from Jaws leaping out of the screen at you? Or Jason’s machete chopping at your face in Friday the 13th Part III? Rubbish, wasn’t it? Fully 3D video has long been a dream of directors, movie execs and game developers, yet thanks to poor implementation and low-tech solutions, it became more of a laughing stock. Nevertheless, things have come a long way from the days when you had to strap a pair of red and green paper glasses to your face. With the improvements in visual computing, 3D video and gaming is coming within the reach of us all. There are a few different methods companies are using to bring 3D to the masses; there’s still a variant on the glasses-based tech, but increasingly there are panels capable of
displaying 3D imagery without the need for special face-wear. Zalman produced one of the first affordable 3D panels last year, slotting neatly into the glasses-based category. Working in conjunction with NVIDIA’s stereoscopic drivers, the display filters the light emitted by the monitor through two polarised elements on the surface of the screen. The glasses too have polarised lenses, which work in tandem with the polarising filters on the monitor to only allow certain light to reach each eye. This gives each eye a slightly different perspective on what’s
“We’ve seen the potential and it’s huge, especially in the gaming sphere”
Taking control of 3D displays Three dimensional imaging might be important, but so is the way we interact with the resulting display. By its very nature, the mouse is an utterly two dimensional device and trying to use it to control a pointer in 3D space would be impossible. Touchscreen is also limited by two dimensions, however tactile it is. The solution to this problem could be something akin to the Wii’s remote – an idea that Californian company Sixense Entertainment has taken on board. Using twin controllers and a base-station sensor to accurately map both controllers’ relative positions in space, you’re able to fully manipulate objects in three dimensions. It’s impressive stuff.
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Above These controllers were another great idea to come out of the NVISION conference and we can’t wait to get our hands on them again
happening on screen, thus creating the 3D effect. Unfortunately, there’s an incredibly limited viewing angle on these panels, which is more noticeable on the vertical movement than the lateral. Small movements of your head make the stereo image drop out of sync, destroying the illusion of 3D. SeeFront is a German company looking to remove the need for the glasses by retro-fitting your existing monitor with a lenticular lens setup. It’s still using the stereoscopic effect, but instead of filters, the SeeFront method uses fine ridges in the panel to angle a slightly different version of the image towards each eye. Its technology takes into account the problems with viewing angles and uses eye-tracking technology to ensure you’re always getting the optimal image. I had the opportunity to play with the device at this year’s NVISION conference and, although this prototype wasn’t set up for gaming, CEO Christoph Grossman assured us that it “will not be restricted to pre-rendered content. Gaming is an important field where real-time rendering on 3D displays will become most popular.” It’s the improvements in hardware capability that SeeFront touts as the important new factor in the future of 3D visuals. “We’ll see 3D displays surfacing on a major scale within the next few years. Finally, the time seems to be ripe for this to happen.” NVIDIA is at the forefront of this technological push because it’s the only one of the two big graphics vendors currently involved in creating stereoscopic drivers for today’s 3D games. This means that if you want to game on any 3D display at the moment, you have to do it on a GeForce GPU
Christmas 2008
29/10/08 11:34:53 am
3D Monitors
Left eye’s image
Right eye’s image
Preparations for coalescence of the two images
Right linear polarisation
Coalesced image
Right circular polarisation
Left linear polarisation Left circular polarisation Linear polariser
3D phase-difference film
LCD panel (RGB) 3D recognition
Blockage of left circular polarisation
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Passage of right circular polarisation
Passage of left circular polarisation Blockage of right circular polarisation
– and on Vista. The last XP release is many years old and doesn’t cover newer titles whereas the most recent update was confined to Vista alone. The improvement of graphics hardware is integral to the march of 3D, especially with the stereoscopic method. Because it involves the GPU rendering two separate images, the demands the stereoscopic driver places on the hardware are huge. The future of actual 3D is rosy though. With more and more companies competing to create the killer-app/killer-hardware, the user is going to be the ultimate winner. We’ve seen the potential and it’s huge, especially in the gaming sphere. Fingers crossed it wont be long before that potential is realised. ¤
Above The stereoscopic method of creating a 3D image relies on polarising lenses to show a different image to each eye
“There are displays that can display 3D imagery without the face-wear” Next Month: Triple-channel DDR3 uncovered
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In the red corner NVIDIA is the only company actively working on stereoscopic drivers, but AMD is also taking notice. “Stereo 3D (S3D) gaming hasn’t received tremendous acceptance because of poor image quality and sub-optimal 3D The AMD/ATI community is performance,” an AMD demanding 3D drivers spokesperson told us. “However, new display technologies and powerful 3D GPUs offer significant image quality and performance improvements that can provide an enjoyable S3D gaming experience.” The AMD/ATI community has been demanding stereoscopic drivers for their cards since 2002, but it’s still focusing on creating the cards rather than extending the drivers. That said, AMD cards are compatible with some 3D panels. “iZ3D for example, has a driver that works with our GPUs to offer several S3D output techniques such as Anaglyph (red/green glasses) and their own proprietary solution unique to their 3D monitor,” explains AMD. The iZ3D panel uses two different screens offering slightly different images, which pass through a polarisation filter to create the effect via passive polarised glasses.
Christmas 2008
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