How we fell in love with stereo-3D. Share your experience!

[koshien]

Hi everyone!
How did we start to get excited about stereo-3D? How long ago? How did you find out about mtbs3d?! Share your experience!
5 years ago, I was about 18 and I was studying in a high-school in Milwaukee for an exchange student program.
I spent my spring break in Florida and I went to the Universal Studios in Orlando.
I enjoyed so much the Spider-man 3D ride...it really was an amazing experience!
The pop-out effect was fantastic, with spiderman and goblin really fighting in front of your nose and all around you! As if they were real crazy people running all around
Once back in Italy, I read on a tech magazine about this company, in-three, making 3D movies out of 2D cult movies (Top Gun, Star Wars, etc...). I remember reading about 120 Hz and shutterglasses and the fact these glasses were starting to be cheap enough to go mainstream and be used in movie theaters.
Unfortunately I wasn't a pc gamer and it all ended 'cause I didn't know about stereo-3D gaming
But I knew 3D was coming... and I was waiting for it...
Last year I had to buy a new tv and I remembered about that article on the high-tech magazine...so I started to look for 100/120 Hz TVs and I asked a lot of confused questions in specialized video/tv forums...some of them gave some answers...the 100 Hz I was going to buy were not real 100 Hz and all that stuff... so I just kept researching...and finally I heard about mtbs3d on an Italian pc gamers' forum
So, here I am, just a student, without that much money and without a modern stereo-3D solution...waiting for my mom's pc to finally break to get a powerful pc and a 3D monitor/visor... 8)
How about you guys?!

[koshien]

Oh! Found it!
Watch this video, it's all about the Spiderman 3D ride, starting at 50 seconds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PcLmfBU ... re=related
It shows the backstage of the 3D ride, really interesting

[WheatstoneHolmes]

I grew up in the 80s when 3D was making a comeback.

A movie called "The Mask" http://www.amazon.com/Mask-Anne-Colling ... 981&sr=8-1 was going to be shown on TV, the stores were selling the 3D glasses and the ones near me sold out so I made my own 3D glasses out of cardboard, plastic for the lenses and blue and red markers (I was young and didn't know it was supposed to be cyan not blue).

Inspired by "The Mask" and a "Jaws 3D" poster a friend had I used red and blue markers to draw 3D pictures on paper, quickly finding that the blue should be cyan.

A couple of years went by and a movie called "SPACEHUNTER- ADVENTURES IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE" came out in the theatres and I begged my family to go see it.

We did and I remember getting some 3D glasses that looked like Pulfrich http://www.rainbowsymphony.com/3dpulfrich.html glasses.

(One lens was light, the other dark. Maybe the theatre got the wrong glasses? Shouldn't they have been polarized glasses with the lenses looking basically the same?)

Then through the years I actively looked for anything and everything 3D, comic books, TV shows, movies, posters, books, stickers, etc.

I made my own anaglyph gallery application for a website in 1999 and thought I would have some fun by making the visitor guess which eye the red lens should be on.

Now that I look back I think that was a pretty stupid game and just annoying.

Sometime in the 90s I came across some shutter glasses for PC, they were packaged with a graphics card, but they were too expensive for me.

I just recently tried the eDimensional glasses with LCD monitors, but I guess the refresh isn't fast enough for me and ultimately I was disappointed and sent them back.

I'm almost done building a crude 2 monitor Planar style 3D setup similar to this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlQyy6i3tPo (not my video, I'll post my setup pics soon).

I am slowly collecting 3D movies and would like to make my own.

Also I'm working on making a completely 3D website.

[cybereality]

I think my first experience with 3D had to be with the old Viewmaster as a kid. I had a ton of slides and I used to love the thing. The next thing I remember was getting this 3D comic book, The Rocketeer, when I was like 12 or something. The comic rocked and it looks like the characters were jumping off the pages, totally awesome. I think I must have seen some 3D movies as a kid but I can't seem to remember any of them. The only one I do recall was the nightmare on elm street, Freddys Dead with a 3D sequence at the end. Some years had passed and then I heard about 3D gaming glasses for the PC and I just had to have them. I ordered the original Another Eye's for about $150, the ones that looked like Geordi LaForge:


Turns out they were broken and I ended up exchanging them for some Force3D glasses (same as the edimensional). Then guess what? They didnt work with my brand new ATI card! So I had to trade that in for a geforce card. A pain in the butt, but well worth the effort. After I got everything set up and it worked, just wow. I was hooked. I've been an avid stereo3D fan ever since.

Since then I ended up getting 2 more sets of shutter glasses, the ELSA revelators and the Another Eye 2000s. An HMD, the VR920 and most recently the Zalman Trimon monitor. I'm pretty happy with the Zalman but I'm thinking about getting the Viewsonic 3D projector whenever that comes out. Theres now way I can go back to 2D, I'm a 3D fanatic for life!

[Likay]

I recall i had one of these viewmasters when i was a kid. One of the things i had that didn't end up disassembled into molecules. Well, not that soon anyway...
First contact with stereo-3d gaming was a game: "Nanosaur 2-Hatchling" which has native support for anaglyph. Since i was in the disco and light business for a while i managed to find somewhat working colorfilters and made a pair of anaglyph glasses. Ghosting was terrible but oh myyy....! I was blown away! Interactiv 3d was the best thing that i experienced so far with a computer!
Eventually i found an advertize for the e-dimensional shutterglasses and out of curiosity ordered a pair. I didn't really have any high expectations and had my doubt about 3d-gaming in all.
Install of the glasses was a pain. The drivers that came with the glasses refused to install because i had an nvidiacard. However there was a guide on how to get drivers separately for these: First contact with nvidiastereo!
Ok: Installed a suitable combo: like 50.00 drivercombo or something and fired up the thing. Sweet memories still brings a smile to my face! When activated stereo-ddc-shutterglasses option, opened up the nvidia testapplication: Seing that rotating/floating nvidialogo all of a sudden flying right in front of my nose... Lol! I could have bought the glasses just for this!
I started to hang around in the nvidiaforums 3d-section sharing and getting tips among others for better experiences with 3d. That's the place where i heard about mtbs3d by the infamous "Chopper".

Time has passed and the e-dims i had made way for a passive projector rig, homebuilt stereocamera etc. I'm looking forward to what the future has in store.

Cheers

[koshien]

Interesting stories

[Likay]

Interesting stories

It invites to.

[Neil]

Her name was Evga. They told me she was mid-range, but I knew better. I don't know if it was her visual beauty or the caffeine talking, but she was my S-3D summer love. Oh Evga...with her dual head output, her overclocked processing power, and her naughty behaviour with post processing effects...

You never forget your first time.

Regards,
Neil

[Likay]

How sweet! ^^

[Welder]

Well, mine is simple =/

I went to a computer LAN party 2 or so years ago in Oregon, and iZ3D just happened to be a sponsor(The first, and LAST time they have actually sponsored that event with a booth)
And it, happened to be the first time I ever went to that LAN. I went with a friend from a different sponsor, and he kinda made friends with a person from iZ3D, and we all went to dinner, and I made friends with David from iZ3D, and Aaron.
I checked the monitor out at the event, and thought it was like the coolest thing ever! I have always kinda enjoyed 3D. Like I remember back when I was a little kid in the 90's when they had special episodes of Drew Carrey, and Home Improvement, which were in Anaglyph. I always went and got glasses to watch. I have also always enjoyed IMAX 3D Movies when I was a kid also.

So, anyway, after meeting with David and Aaron at the LAN, I sent an email asking if they had an opening, and they did, and after doing contract work for them for a while(I installed/themed the forums) I was an employee of iZ3D, and now 3D Rocks


That is my story.

So, right place, right time, right people

[yuriythebest]

Like I remember back when I was a little kid in the 90's when they had special episodes of Drew Carrey,

wow the Drew Carey show had anaglyph episodes? cooool wanna watch em someday. that show rulez

well I used to enjoy the my parents soviet version of the viewmaster as a kid, however more recently
I stumbled across 3d quite accidentally. I was at the time looking for the next big hardware improvement to enhance my 3ds max experience and stumbled upon the edimensional website, and thought that having stereo3d 3ds max support would be the awesomest thing ever. Their tech support led me on and I thought that 3ds max support was "coming soon" so I bought em. Of course later I was less than impressed with the driver support but the actual 3d really impressed me even though I had to buy a used 19' CRT. Then I got some anaglyph glasses thanks to the awesome Freke1, then I got an iz3d thanks to the awesome ppl from iz3d, then I got some colorcode glasses for free from the official colorcode site just to test em out and compare with anaglyph


TO BE CONTINUED...

[BlackShark]

I discovered 3D at Disney when i was a kid 7~8 years old. It went to both Disney World Orlando and Disneyland Paris (it just opened). I don't remember in which of them but there was a 3D film in Discoveryland with Michael Jackson in a space ship, i don't remember a thing about what was happening in the film but i do remember it was in 3D.

A few years later, i was around 10 years old i went to Futuroscope, a french park around cinema and high tech imaging stuff. They had some of the firsts Imax screens in europe, and they had like 4 of them, some huge flat cinema screens, some spherical curved ones, some 60fps projections, and two of them were 3D (one standard size and one spherical Imax). In a separate building they also had a Virtual Reality video game. Graphics were pretty basic, it was the beginning of the use of polygons for videogames but the 3D effect worked. The only problem was that the helmet was very heavy, and as a kid it was quite difficult to keep my head balanced.

In 2000 in my usual supermarket i spotted an unusual box in the middle of the videogames shelves : it has a weird name : ELSA 3D revelator, and it was the wireless infrared version, i had never heard about it. I discussed about it with my parents, we noticed that by chance the family computer was compatible (we had a Riva-TNT2 32 ULTRA in the PC) and a big CRT monitor which was fast enough, so my parents bought it.
It was amazing, it worked really well, there was just a little problem : the batteries were the big watch flat batteries, these were very expansive, not rechargeable, and you needed two of them. so i replaced them once and put the glasses in a box and forgot about them.

A few years later, while searching for some computer cable with a friend, we found them again and this friend wanted to try the 3D effect, so we bought new batteries and it worked, but my graphics card was not powerful enough to sustain playable refreshrates at that time, so we could enjoy the scenery in 3D but when we needed to play seriously we had to switch off the 3D effect to get some playable framerate. But it was fun again and my friend was very impressed (so was I). Eventually the batteries went dead and i put the glasses back in their box, and then i bought an LCD monitor.

18 month ago, i worked on beta-testing the videogame update TrackMania Forever (for Trackmania United and Trackmania Nations), in this update had a new native stereo3D feature, this is the time when i re-re-discovered 3D, developped my 3D video editing skills, found about iZ3D drivers, MTBS3D and all the 3D gaming community. I still had my 3D revelators but couldn't use them (LCD monitor + polarisation of the screen not matching the glasses) so i was stuck with anaglyph.
I considered buying an iZ3D monitor when i heard about the upcoming 26" model and decided i'd wait for the bigger screen.
This is also why i made my videos in stereoscopic format so that i could stil enjoy them once I'd get a real 3D monitor. After a year of waiting and still no real announcement on the specs or any idea of a release date, i saw that the Zalman screen price had dropped dramatically way below the price of the iZ3D monitor (due to the shipping costs).
Since it was so cheap, I bought the Zalman screen and just the interlaced driver from iZ3D (since i use XP i can't use the nvidia driver), that was a month ago.
It's so good to see games in 3D again !

I'm still waiting for a more recent and bigger screen, I'm hoping for the next iZ3D monitor to amaze me and i'm looking forward to meet the prototype at dimension 3 expo.

[Freke1]

I bought a pair of eDimensional glasses in 2005, I think I just saw them on the net.
I had no idea how they would worked, but they did. I still use them.
I'm an eDimensional fanboy 8)

[lnrrgb]

Damn! The mounting grey hairs haven't done it. The deepening wrinkles, ever trying, still fail. It takes thread full of war stories to make me feel old for the first time! LOL "when I was a kid in the 90's" --geeeeeezZzuuuuus...I am feeling my age now! Oh well, your turns will come:)

We were never prosperous enough for a viewmaster, but I remember playing with them every chance I got, when visiting friends who had them. I don't know, we probably had a few, but we were hard on our toys back then. But we could not break our grandparents version of the viewmaster! I remember staring at pictures of pioneers, cowboys & indians, mountain ranges and vast prairies. Well, maybe I exaggerate a little, as basically I don't remeber what we looked at, but I remember being fond of their stereoscopic pictures when I was quite young (late 60's, early 70's).

In school, there were random bouts of fun, yet still educational materials, that circled around, and one of these was a magazine of sorts, called DYNAMITE!!! The publishers must have been 3D enthusiasts, because they often had issues with 3D glasses inside.

The rest of my story, pretty much follows along like the earlier stories in this thread - stumbling upon eDimensional, futzing with hardware, frustration punctuated with an AHA!!! moment.... then far too many sad driverless dry spells.

On a moot tangent, am I the first to notice that MTBS3D can be read as empty BS (you know bullsh--)3D... emptyBS..lol...

sorry Neil:), I know we have not always seen eye to eye, and that any effort is applaudable. I never thought this site would make a go of it, and I am glad to see I was so wrong, but I can't help but giggle a little.

[yuriythebest]

On a moot tangent, am I the first to notice that MTBS3D can be read as empty BS (you know bullsh--)3D... emptyBS..lol...

sorry Neil:), I know we have not always seen eye to eye, and that any effort is applaudable. I never thought this site would make a go of it, and I am glad to see I was so wrong, but I can't help but giggle a little.

Lolz EMpty_B**S_3d hahahaha!! dude you rule. Yeah Neil that was an oversight on your part but I doubt people will use this seriously since one must really dislike MTBS3d for some reason to do that plus they must read this thread, cause seriously this has never occurred to me. In other news the filename of the MTBS3d game analyzer, which was called something like "MTBSrating.swf" is also funny if misread

[WheatstoneHolmes]

Well, MTBS.com leads to Modern Times Bookstore.

[cybereality]

I forgot to mention: I also was very fond of the Virtuality arcades in the mid-90's. If anyone else remembers they had virtual reality setups with a humongous HMD with stereo3d and headtracking along with a cyberpuck like controller. They had a game called Dactyl's Nightmare which was a multiplayer VR FPS and also this mechwarrior game. It was all flat-shaded 3D, there weren't even texture maps yet but it was state-of-the-art. Ah the memories.

[BlackShark]

The VR-game i played at futuroscope park looked exactly like the picture of the virtuality you showed.
µI don't remember the names written on it at that time but that must have been it.

[yuriythebest]

I forgot to mention: I also was very fond of the Virtuality arcades in the mid-90's.

ahh yes, I played "blood" and "quake 1" on a similar device. though to tell the truth I don't think I noticed the stereo3d aspect of it back then

[WheatstoneHolmes]

I played one at Disney Quest arcade in Orlando, Florida.

They gave us all helmet holders and said they had to be screwed on tightly, someone asked "does it hurt?" and they said "no, it just has to be tight"

When I got up there the attendant screwed that thing in so hard I thought it might go into my brain stem!

[yuriythebest]

virtuality+crysis FTW

[UndeadD3vi1]

I haven't fallen in love with Stereo 3D. I simply see it as natural progression. It is the future, but at the same time alot of methods are gimmicky at best.

I did have my first physical reaction to Pop-out last night however

[koshien]

I haven't fallen in love with Stereo 3D. I simply see it as natural progression.

It is seen as a natural progression, but there are people in here that have been playing in 3D for years, even when Nvidia dropped 3D drivers support... was it so easy back then to see 3D as a natural progression...? Well, maybe it was reasonable...but not so certain, and not in such short times... there are users here that believe in 3D as natural progression, but I think there must be some love and enthusiasm to keep supporting it for years, even when people didn't care about it

[yomer]

Where to start.... (to make a long story short, I'm going to use bullets)

-Late 80's with Viewmaster
-Early 90's trip to DisneyWorld (I can't remember the whole movie, but I do remember a bird flying around the room)
-Late mid to late 90's Virtual Reality FPS in the mall ($5 per game session)
-Y2K, I bought myself the Eye3D 4 in 1 wireless kit and a Guillemot TNT2 Ultra
-Y2K1, Clive Barker's Undying in S3D, nuff said
-Y2K1, stupid change to an Ati Radeon 64MB VIVO (workarounds with VRCaddyME, VRcaddyXP, Win3D)
-Games Played during this stage of Eye3D and Ati Radeon (in no special order)
-Unreal Series
-Undying
-QuakeGL
-Quake2 (Nice vertigo with Dam map)
-Quake3
-American McGee's Alice
-DeusEX
-RealMyst ( )
-Serious SAM
-King Pin
-Carmageddon with 3DFX Glide Wrapper
-Project64 n64 Emu
-Flight Simulator
-Empire Earth (I don't remember if it was this game, but it was an awesome RTS)
-Need For Speed
-Deer Hunter
-Return to Castle Wolfenstein
-Max Payne
-Half Life
-And many more....

...to hell with bullets, going with the longer story.

It was my golden age of 3D. While I enjoyed S3D with my Guillemot TNT2 Ultra, after the mistake of getting the Ati Radeon 64MB VIVO (R100), I actually was pleasantly surprised by the combination of drivers and how I finally got my Ati to work with S3D in many games (As I mentioned above I used a combination of Wicked3D, EyeScream drivers, Eye3D, Win3D, mesa OGL, VRcaddy(ME and XP). I did the impossible to use workarounds for playing games with any available wrapper/driver

But then, companies started selling their wrappers and drivers to devs (stopping free support) or going out of business; and my S3D world started to crumble down and I could only enjoy a few new games.

I don't know why I never bought an NVidia card, maybe it was my lack of "vision" on investing in something that would bring more pleasure to my life. So here I am now, with my Eye3D 4 in 1 still working, but my old computer with the Ati card stashed(which I never upgraded). I recently bought 2 x 21" Diamond Pro CRTs which are gathering dust (It was actually one, but I got the second one free ...the irony.

Maybe one of these days I'll buy a used computer with an Nvidia card to play does DX8/DX7 games. And another newer computer to play DX9+ games. All I do now is either wait for that moment or wait for the next S3D movie to come out, just to sob at the idea of not being able to play S3D games.

My wife and I are expecting our first baby and I don't have enough to spare on an iz3d, on a computer, or an HMD (which has been a dream of mine for so long). I keep entering sweepstakes to be able to win any of these; obviously with no luck.

So, that's my story. I'm 25 years old now, with the world ahead of me, but still wanting to go back to the past or mend it in some way.

[WheatstoneHolmes]

Here is a way to use your 2 CRTs:

http://www.cs.brown.edu/~cad/wheatstone_intro.pdf

http://spie.org/x8365.xml?ArticleID=x8365

I'm sure the design could be simplified so you can just set the 2 CRTs to either side of a desk or something and mount 2 mirrors somewhere between them.

I know, this requires a person to sit still and/or lean forward all the time and my become very uncomfortable, but it may be worth a shot for fun and of course...for science!

EDIT: Oops, sorry, this doesn't solve the game problem.

[yomer]

Indeed. I would still need a computer with dual output.

[brosko48]

I love some kind of 3D. Especially when we ride a 3D roller coaster. I spent my time Awing!, while were on our ride. We don't care if what will others felt about it. just for me, I enjoyed it!!



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