I thought i read somewhere that the IR emitter and receiver are different so that it doesn't interfere with some remote controls...

Yeah, that makes sense. Still, the glasses look suspiciously similar.

whow..that with the remote might be right. I notice sync-issues when i play with mine.

But, however, IMHO a LCD shutter is a LCD shutter....there cannot be that much difference, if AT ALL. So i am *assuming* they put some drivers with the glasses, supporting DLP mode..and then sell it as "new DLP glasses".

On several occasion (even in my TV manual) it says glasses are required with the standard VESA DIN connector, and the emitter and glasses should be from the same company...but it doesnt specifically say that it only works with a certain brand/kind.

you could change some parts in the electronics. If you build in some delay to get the glasses to work better with e.g. plasma...

The other thing is to build in a reverse 'switch' to swap pictures - like you need it for a DLP projector. Otherwise you'd have to rewire cables, get a retarder or make somehow with software...

well the point is i still get way too much ghosting using the ED glasses...and i wonder whether i would have this with "the right" glasses also or whether it would just be a waste of $ since the result would be the same as using the ED glasses.

Problem is i have different opinions, ED of course told me i need the special glasses and the "old" ones wouldnt work...but then this might very well only refer to the software included..(which i already have).

When i got this set i didnt expect any ghosting at all (i think it was even advertized as 3D now finally without ghosting)...but the ghosting here is almost as bad as watchign soem anaglyph.

Then i dont know what causes the ghosting...whether it also effects DLPs and only applies to Plasma???


G.

Former user of E-D shutters.

I believe the shutterglasses themselves are fast enough to switch without any ghosting at all (or at least minimized to that picture that slips through a blocking glass of the shutters). This is proved by some people using dlp-projectors that's able to keep up to the refresh rate. When you're using a crt-monitor the situation is a bit different. The light emitted from a crt comes from a phosphoric layer on the inside of the tube. That layer emitts lights when hit by electrons from the cannon of the backside of the tube. The trouble is that the phosphoric layer has quite some afterglow and doesn't stop emitting light as soon as the electronbeam moves to another position. This is one thing that may cause ghosting when using crt/shutters. A way to decrease the effect of this is simply to turn down the refreshrate to a value where ghosting/flickering is bearable. When i had crt/shutters i couldn't use 120Hz refresh because of the heavy ghosting. Decreasing it to 85Hz gave the best effect for me. Lowering the refreshrate more decreased ghosting but gave me too much flicker. Have no idea of eventual afterglow of plasmascreens work though. Regarding lcd's and shutters the problem isn't the shift speed of the crystals. It's more a question of electronic bandwidth and the lag between a change of the signal until the change is noticed on the screen.

About the phenomena with glasses that successively gets darker... It has never happened to me and i used wireless E-D's. It was a few years ago though and the glasses might have been Up-(down?)-graded.

The issues i had with mine was batteryeating and bad reach of the ir'transmitter. I had to sit with the receiver at a maximum of 3 dm's from the transmitter. The viewing experince was still a joy though!

I really hope you find some fixes for your rig. Gaming in 3d on a big screen is the best you can experience! (maybe not, but it comes close. )
Your beamer is a dlp and should work to some degree. Try with 50Hz to start with.

cheers

well the theory behind the "afterglow" is known to me, and with the plasma i am in the same boat as with an CRT. The problem is i dont know whether this is good now or bad.
I hear that Plasmas, in regards to "reaction times" are good and on par with CRTs.

I actually do have a software to kind of measure latency and reaction times...pixperan...this is usually used on LCDs to get an idea about the speed of a panel.
I run some tests, and in "normal" mode the plasma shows defintly better response times than even my very fast LCD (which is 5ms +/-)...when i turn on "3D Mode" than is ee a little latency coming up, probably coming from the internal algorhitms. The subjective response time of the plasma in 3D mode i would compare to my LCD monitor here, i would guess around 5-8ms or something.

Then i dont know whether this is even related to the phosphor "after glow"/latency effect which certainly exists...and its a given that there is SOME ms delay where an image might "glow" on the screen....so i could definitly see this playing a role. But its definitly not something in any way "visible", like "trails" or similar...and this is actually why people often get plasmas, for fast moving scenes etc. since they have an advantage there, now compared to LCDs or other panel technologies.

I have to say, right now, i am disappointed since the ghosting is really bad, in addition the fact that turning the glasses on also darkens the picture..so the experience as such is not as good as i expected.

Thanks for all your answers. Actually, when I tested it, the glasses start getting darker after a couple of minutes already, not half an hour. It takes a bit more time before it gets unbearable though.

As to my projector, I can't see a way of getting it to display good stereo. If I set 60Hz refresh, the picture gets less jumpy, but flickering is unacceptable. If I set 85Hz (which is max for X1), the flicker isn't bad, but the picture is very unstable. Besides, the sheer size of the diaplay buggers up stereo - the viewing angles are too far from 90deg near the edges of the screen.

Actually, I'm not entirely happy with the way stereo works on my CRT either... I mean, technically it seems ok. But playing in true 3D seems to be very tireing (or rather "strainful") to the eyes. No matter how I tweak separation or convergence, the image lacks this stability it has in flat 3D. The reason might be that I have very sensitive eyes - I seem to percept everything slightly faster than the average person (for example, the movies in cinema aren't animated smoothly enough for me, it feels much like playing a game when framerate drops and it gets "choppy"; I also have very fast reflexes - my average measured reaction time is 0.18s as opposed to ~0.30s of a typical person) - which is great of course, but it seems there are downsides as well... I'm looking with hope at InFocus' DepthQ projector, maybe that's the answer to my prayers. It's just a bit expensive...

I really wouldn't waste money on the DepthQ. You can get 2 very good projectors for that price.

Also I'm not sure what that condition is called, but it sounds like it might need either a passive setup or an HMD. Shutter glasses will definitely not help if you experience choppiness in regular 2D movies.

Can you explain this further please?

Any stereo 3d method that uses shutter-glasses will introduce flickering. Some people notice more than others. At 85 Hz (or even 100 Hz) you will get some flicker effect, which may make animation appear choppy. This means that the LCD shutter glasses are flipping on and off at 100 times per second (or rather, half the time you are only looking at a black screen in alternating eyes). So this effectively cuts the visible refresh rate in half. However choppy things look normally, they might appear half as smooth. With a passive system (iz3d, Trimon, dual-projectors) and using polarizer glasses you should get a smoother rate of animation. Also with a HMD, like the TDVisor, you are getting 2 full resolution video streams to each eye (generally at 60hz). You would need a 120hz monitor to get similar a similar rate with an active-stereo setup. The VR920, however, uses page-flipping so you are only really getting 30hz per eye. If the flicker is really bothering you then I believe a dual passive-projector setup (@ 100Hz) would provide the smoothest picture.

Thanks a lot; dual projector setup sounds very interesting (especially that I have one projector already!). Can you point me to someplace where I could find out more about such setups - how much do they cost, how to build etc? - I would really appreciate it.

You are already at the place!

Just look around the forums a bit, you'll find what you are looking for.

Passive dualprojection?

Look especially in the DIY section or at this:
http://www.cmst.curtin.edu.au/publicat/2001-01.pdf

Heres a link for you: http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=509

Hey, thanks a lot, some great reading there! I decided I'm starting to save money for my new S3D setup

That's the right attitude
and untill that time has comen you should inform yourself about the developing technologies - especially, which driver to use then.
IZ3D supports dualproection with their HMD output. It's a dualoutput for 2 different screens, which combine it to S-3D.

I got a reply from eDimensional today:


I don't think it requres any comment. I'm so heavily dissapointed with this company.

On the brighter side, I installed FarCry few days ago and it's absolutely awesome. Actually, it's probably the only game so far that I would be able to play in stereo continuously. Quite surprising how demanding it is though - my 7900GTX could only handle 1024x768/V.High in stereo while maintaining reasonable framerates. But man, how this game looks! Not even Crysis is so pleasing to the eyes!

Crysis in S-3D isn't bad either, but the framerate on gf7 IS...

No matter what I tried it was too ofthen below 20
And lately I lost all the environment and couldn't get it to run anymore. Maybe it will be the right game in 2-3 years - like it is now with FarCry

But have you ever seen Crysis... in 3D!!!!

All jokes aside, Crysis looks simply amazing in 3D but you do need a beast of a machine to run it. And even then, I don't think any of the 3d drivers can support S-3D in very high with DX10.

True, true.

What I meant by saying that FarCry was more pleasing to the eyes was that while Crysis has more "realistic" appearance, FarCry is more "artistic" - I'm abstracting from the actual quality of graphics, just comparing them as two pieces of art. FarCry is simply beautiful.

BTW I couldn't get Crysis to work in S3D. I could enable stereo, but the result was that all the textures were turning into plain surfaces (kind of). I haven't done too much experimenting though. I heard setting all your quality settings to Low could help, but I didn't even try. Crysis on low looks worse than FarCry on v.high. Damn, it almost looks worse than old Half-Life1 :P

To get Crysis in 3d on the nvidia drivers I think you need to set "AA":off, "Motion-Blur":off, "Shadows","Post-Processing","Shaders":low. And yes, Far Cry at max will look better.

The only way I was able to see Crysis in full S-3D glory (almost) was using the Vuzix-stereo driver for the VR920 (since it supports the 8800).

Are the vizuix drivers that good? I didn't hear a lot about them. What is their... disadvantage? Do they only support very limited games or does it run like a slideshow like with Tridef drivers?

I could imagine, that many games run good on it, since the resolution makes it easy for the GPU.

Does it support DX10? Or both vista AND xp?

@ farcry: you're right it looks nice. Like some paradisiac caribic islands. And it's always good weather with sunshine.

About the VR920. It support DirectX 8 and 9. It supports stereo in XP and Vista 32 bits. For now, it does not work in stereo in Vista 64 bits.

The Vuzix-stereo driver is very high quality, but only works with the VR920 HMD. Just DX8/9 at the moment, however it does work on all hardware (8800+, ATI cards) and XP/Vista. I have a feeling there might be a way to hack it to work with shutter-glasses (since the VR920 works based on page-flipping) but I wouldn't know where to start with that. It also syncs via USB, so it would probably need a custom sync-box or something to use with other solutions. The one issue with the driver is limited support, although there are about 30 games officially supported (probably closer to 50 unofficially) so its still not at the level of nvidia or iz3D drivers. S-3D values must be tweaked via config files (limited in-game options) however the defaults are usually perfect. But its for VR920 only, thats the reason people probably aren't talking about it.

In terms of quality, though, it is very good. No problems what-so-ever with the HUD or post-processing. Works very well with Crysis, COD4, UT2K4, HL2, CS:S, Dystopia and others, although many recent games are missing (like Bioshock, UT3, etc). The 3d effect is totally glitch free, no ghosting, no doubling-up on 2d elements, very good performance. I usually run in 800x600 mode on the VR920 and I can get decent framerates on Crysis high settings. Probably around 30fps or more. In 2D with the same settings I'd probably get around 45-50fps, so thats acceptable. Mostly anything else runs at full speed 60fps (HL2, etc.) on an 8800GTS 512MB. Even on my old machine (6800GT) it could run games like UT2K4 or HL2 at acceptable levels.

The only real downside is the hardware itself, the virtual screen just isn't big enough for a fully immersive experience. No way its going to match the size of say a projector setup or the Samsung plasmas. Which is annoying because in this market there are good drivers, and then theres good hardware, but they don't play nice with each other. So frustrating.

in regards to the thread's title, what i noticed:

On the right eye of me ED glasses, i get dark spots and "patches".

I just got a set of old elsa-revelator-style glasses cheap off ebay which i should have tomorrow...together with LOADS of batteries for my ED glasses and the revelator glasses.

The interesting thing is that the so called official tridef/IOD glasses look exactly the same as the old, square shaped ELSA revelator glasses.

Besides exotic things like "crystaleyes" there is really just TWO common forms of shutter glasses out there, its the more roundish one "ED style" glasses and the squareish elsa style glasses. So i bought them off ebay to test whether they work a bit better with my Plasma....i really, really think the ED glasses quality is sub-par...see the patches/blotches i get. I think this might be related to them getting darker. Maybe for some people they just get darker as a whole...some other people they just get dark patches.

Mine get darker in a non-uniform fashion... They always get darker near edges, but there are some random patches as well. I also noticed that if there are some dirt particles on them, they cause dark patches to appear around them. A bit strange. I also get the impression that the darkening effect is less pronounced in low temperatures - I haven't tested it thoroughly though.

what do you mean by high end LCD ??

Some new lcd-screens. Most of them still aren't compatible with shutterglasses. Afaik there's not really another way to find out compability than testing or listen to others who succeeded or not.