The End of 3D Vision

Zloth

I smell a... wumpus!?
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The latest drivers from NVIDIA have completely removed all stereoscopic support, even the old red/blue Discover 3D. As I understand it, the upcoming Windows 10 update will need those new drivers. Even without that update, though, more and more games will require updated drivers and new video cards certainly will do so. 3D Vision is going to dwindle away pretty quickly.

3D Vision works by having the game render from a tiny bit to the right of where the game would normally put the player, showing that to your right eye, then doing the same for your left eye. Special glasses would alternately block the view of the eye that wasn't supposed to be seeing the image. It wasn't a perfect technology. For instance, a pixel that's supposed to be really bright for one eye and dark for the other sometimes couldn't switch all the way over in just 1/60th of a second so you would get a 'ghosting' effect. You could also end up seeing through graphical short-cuts that work great for fooling a cyclops but not so well when you open up your second eye.

The latter problem was often mitigated by a small group of very dedicated shader hackers that worked to create mods to fix those problems. It wasn't always possible but it often was, particularly these days as their tools and knowledge have become quite sophisticated.

I started using it back in 2010 and the system has been awesome for me. The third dimension really worked and worked well. That distant tower really looked like it was miles away. When somebody sticks a gun in my face, I'm going cross-eyed staring at the barrel of that gun that's not even a foot away from my nose! (It let me see some crazy stuff, too. I've seen how the world would look if I woke up one morning with my eyes swapped. My brain has gotten to deal with plenty of instances where an object that's one foot away was covered up by another object that's 2 feet away. ;) When your character has to cross a chasm while balancing on a little log, you're probably just concentrating on keeping the balance right. When I'm doing it in 3D Vision, I'm also fighting vertigo because I can see that it's a LONG WAY DOWN!!

I think that, as VR and AR technology improves, we'll probably do away with physical monitors and just use virtual ones. Those will, of course, be 3D. In fact, they should be even better at 3D as there won't be any ghosting effect. Maybe we'll even play some old games on those monitors, using the same shader hacks created for 3D Vision. I'll certainly be using them to look at my 5000+ 3D screenshots!
 
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I've really enjoyed 3dvision, especially in LOTRO. I'll delay updating drivers as long as I can.

pibbur
 
Yeah, you can achieve the same thing in VR in cinema mode, where the game appears as if it's projected on a large 3d screen in front of you. The effect is good, but the resolution is nowhere near good enough on current headsets.
 
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Yeah, I think the next gen looks like it could make it, though - at least the high end ones.

Seems to me like AR would be better for this, though. When you're just plopping a screen up, there's no need to block out the rest of the world.

I'm playing Rise of the Tomb Raider as (probably) my final game in 3D Vision. The Tomb Raider games have always been awesome in 3D and this one throws in some apocalyptic events on top of that. Perfect!
 
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That's terrible news :( i was about to fiddle with this again, (i have a 3D vision projector from Benq).. just needed a new shelf for the projector. Witcher 3 in 3D was so stunning…

I don't care the least for playing these games in VR with that cinema mode thing. VR is very uncomfortable.. its ok to use for 30 mins or so, 3D vision you can play in for many hours + don't need to wear a complete mask over my head. Also, the stereoscopic 3D with e.g the Rift was not as impressive i'd argue.

Need to research what driver to use, and if its possible to not update Windows (i doubt it is).. i've updated my drivers fairly recently, like a week ago so i bet its removed.

Might install Windows 7 with some old drivers instead. I often care very little for new games anyways.
 
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425.31 were the last drivers to support 3D Vision.
 
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Losti has figured out a way to get 3D Vision working with the latest drivers. Basically: alter them to look for different versions. Seems to be working for people.

So the end of the official road but there does appear to be an unmaintained path going forward.
 
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A little help down the path: http://helixmod.blogspot.com/2017/05/3d-fix-manager.html

Pauldusler has updated his 3D Vision helper program so it will now put the 3D Vision drivers into your current drivers. I've got 3D Vision working with driver version 430.86 now (so Windows shouldn't even try to update it when 1903 shows up for me).
 
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It'll be interesting to see if 3D augmented reality glasses make any headway. I'm sure advertisers will also love it though, which may kill the technology.
 
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Augmented reality would work best as a type of theme park set up (live roleplaying, paintball etc). In such a theme park it could be set up to track walls and other objects (=acts as real life collision boxes - maybe in a transparent material to not interfere with the visuals). Then people could fight full size dragons and monsters together. I'm pretty sure it exists already somewhere.
 
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Basic AR is just VR without the back panel so you can see your surroundings. This would be really handy for anyone that needs to deal with 3D models like Computer Aided Design. 3D Vision could do this, too, but it was stuck in the monitor.

It can get smarter than that, though, if the set actually starts interpreting what's around it. For instance, if you were driving with a headset that was giving you directions, it wouldn't just say "go left in 0.1km", it could actually put an animated arrow on the turn and keep it on the road even as your head turns. (Like how the tutorial for the most recent Tomb Raider game sticks the help text right on the item you need help with.)

I could see AR working really well for games, too, as a compromise between a monitor and the fully immersive (but blinding) VR systems. Set your desk up in front of a very black wall and you can tell the AR system to put the game world in front of your desk going out through that wall. It wouldn't be as immersive but you would be able to see your mouse/keyboard/children without having to take the whole thing off. Or even play in the dark with a lit keyboard/mouse/child and you can put more of the game world around you.
 
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