Zloth
I smell a... wumpus!?
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!
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!