A few days ago I wrote a post about ‘True 3D’ gaming. I asked why, with today’s technology, this wasn’t just standard equipment.
Turns out it almost is standard equipment, just very few people are using it.
I did some research and found a pair of shutter glasses from Edimensional. These promised to turn the vast majority of my games into True 3D. The best part was the price for these was only $70 (or $50 if you have a CRT monitor).
I’d heard that Nvidia cards work much better with these glasses, because nvidia cards support ‘page flipping’ natively (rapidly switching between the two perspectives). ATI cards don’t…and I have a ATI card.
Anyway, just to check it out I downloaded the ATI driver from the website to see if it would actually work on my system. It worked on Half-life 2, Farcry, Star Wars Battlefront 2 and Combat Flight Simulator. The only game I tried that it didn’t work on was my old copy of X-Wing Alliance.
Anyway, the idea of playing these games in true 3D has my mouth watering.
What I don’t get is why these glasses aren’t on every gamer’s desk. Every single review I read had nothing but good things to say about them, and installation consists of connecting a dongle between your graphics card and monitor.
From two of the many reviews I read:
“Playing HL2 I walked up to a group of rebels and as I approached, I saw they were standing in a circle. A REAL circle. The only way I can describe the effect is to say pull the screen out of your monitor, pull all the guts out, and put 4 GI-Joes in a circle inside. That’s what it looks like.”
“Call of Duty 2 is awesome with these. I nearly jumped out of my chair on instinct when I saw a panzershrek rocket coming at me. Driving games are great as well, you can really ‘feel’ the road. I got a sense of movement I’ve just never experienced in a game before.”
WANT!
3 comments:
I've used those (probably not that specific brand, but if not, very similar). It worked okay, but I've seen better. I think there was a bit of ghosting caused by either the flicker (i.e. refresh) rate being too slow, or the quality of the liquid crystals in the lenses being not as great. More noticeable I think was the very small lenses. If you look at them, they aren't very big, which means you have to look directly down them (it's a bit of a pain if, like me, you wear actual eyeglasses to being with). In addition, they probably should be more wrap around to keep out external light which makes it harder to see (though you can do that by playing in the dark I suppose).
Just my recollections, though, I could be way off.
I've tried similar glasses myself, and experienced a lot of the same problems...however that was in 1998 (nearly 10 years ago).
I'm not expecting these to work perfectly, especially with my LCD monitor, but I also have a CRT capable of about 120hz...so it should be ok.
Also, I checked it out and ED's glasses have the largest lenses before you step up to the $1000 a pair models.
Good luck! Incidentally, the program I posted in my Halo 3D blog post (StereoPhoto Maker) should support shutter glasses, so if nothing else you can download stereo image pairs and enjoy those in full color.
I'm not really sure why the glasses get so expensive unless it's the quality (or amount) of liquid crystals. Or maybe it's just the niche nature of it.
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