VR920 firmwire update!

Post by **wuhlei** » Fri Jan 18, 2008 6:26 pm

The new firmwire is out but the stereo feature only supports 2 games.

http://www.vuzix.com/iwear/support_down ... ivers.html

Post by **Znith** » Fri Jan 18, 2008 8:46 pm

Wuhlie you seem to be the only one without problems using the new firmware. I'd advise anyone wanting to update to wait until next week or so because there seems to be some people having problems from what I've read on the Vuzix forums. Hopefully it can be worked out rather quickly.

Post by **wuhlei** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 1:19 am

aw man the vr920 driver was the last hope for 3d im screwed! I cant even view 3d pictures
I'm just going to buy a geforce7900 and just overclock hell out of it.

Post by **cirk2** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 1:57 am

The updater software seems to have a problem. I can't update. So lets look what will come

Post by **VadersApp** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 11:35 am

I am one of those who now have a "high end brick". Which games are supported if the update worked? And how good is the effect compared to nvidia drivers? Postprocssiing works...? Seperation and convergence?

Post by **wuhlei** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 4:14 pm

Stereo support for

Rfactor racing
Microsoft Flight simulator X

I dont have my pc on me just the vr920 and a pentium 2 laptop atm lol sorry

you can email them to have your vr920 repaired. http://www.vuzix.com/contact/index.aspx

Post by **CarlKenner** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 10:35 pm

The firmware update has been removed from the website. You can blame me. Sorry. I told everyone not to risk it because it was too likely to brick their VR920, so Vuzix removed it until it is fixed. If you are still brave enough to give it a try, maybe you have to ask wuhlei to send it to you.

I was really looking forward to this update. But now I used it and my VR920 is a brick. So I have to wait for them to fix the update program, and possibly send me a replacement VR920.

But then I can hopefully have a go at making a generic VR920 stereo driver.

Post by **wuhlei** » Sun Jan 20, 2008 3:28 pm

if the vr920's stereoscopic driver is working at all I should be able to use software page flipping right?

hey is your vr920 volume menu showing up at all?

Post by **CarlKenner** » Sun Jan 20, 2008 8:44 pm

Yes, you should be able to use software page flipping, but the SDK hasn't been updated yet.

No, the volume menu doesn't show up.

Post by **wuhlei** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 2:33 am

I tried 2 movie player's so far on software page flip no luck.

a kid on the vr920 forum said he got it working after he tried the update again in vista.

Post by **orion1612** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 4:55 pm

wuhlei can you activate the 3d mode in your glasses and still have a functioning desktop?
When I try to, the desktop freezes and stays that way until I deactivate 3d again.

Post by **wuhlei** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 10:11 pm

yeah same here im not sure what its for.

Post by **CarlKenner** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 11:25 pm

What does software page flip mean? When I said it would work with software page flipping, I meant programs made with the VR920 SDK.

Post by **wuhlei** » Tue Jan 22, 2008 7:32 pm

I saw it on a couple stereoscopic movie players.

Post by **CarlKenner** » Tue Jan 22, 2008 9:04 pm

You could try using the VR920 menu (holding down the wheel for 3 seconds) to choose the L-stereo or R-stereo options. They are designed for page-flipping software that doesn't directly support the VR920.

But the firmware update should allow programs specially written for the VR920 to provide stereo more reliably.

Post by **wuhlei** » Thu Jan 24, 2008 12:25 am

CarlKenner wrote:You could try using the VR920 menu (holding down the wheel for 3 seconds) to choose the L-stereo or R-stereo options. They are designed for page-flipping software that doesn't directly support the VR920.

But the firmware update should allow programs specially written for the VR920 to provide stereo more reliably.

it doesnt work

it just freezes the image.

Post by **orion1612** » Thu Jan 24, 2008 5:22 pm

Been e-mailing with Todd from tech support on this issue.
He's puzzled, apparently that's not supposed to happen.
He's going to bring up the issue with the engineers tomorrow.

Post by **wuhlei** » Thu Jan 24, 2008 10:26 pm

cool thank you!

Post by **orion1612** » Fri Jan 25, 2008 9:02 pm

Ok here's Todd's answer:

The behavior you are seeing with the 3D selection mode is perfectly normal, it turns out. I brought this up at our meeting today, and the use of that configuration mode was made more clear to me. The VR920 will automatically detect all dominance in field sequential 3D, and switch to the appropriate mode with no need for manual configuration. In older versions of the nVidia stereo drivers, sometimes the proper signal would be sent, requiring the use of the button to switch modes if the image seemed distorted. This legacy use is almost never needed at this point. It was kept in the VR920's OSD, though, because on occasion, the signal to go back to mono mode is lost, and you get stuck in 3D mode. This allows you to go back to mono.

If you're interested in the details behind the behavior you're seeing, it's rather simple, it turns out. The switching between left eye field and right eye field is accomplished via a signal which comes through the USB connection. When you are manually taking the VR920 to 3D mode, using that button, you are seeing the last frame of the video that had been playing, typically your desktop. That single frame is sitting in the displays, because the USB has cleared the frame buffer, and is waiting for the signal to send the next frame along. Since there is no signal (the computer is 2D mode, after all, so no switching is actually occurring), the last frame just sits there. When you switch back to 2D mode, the video again starts playing at 60 frames per second.

Also, as to the stereo jpeg viewer, we are definitely working on a releasable version of one. I would expect it to be up on our website in the next couple of weeks. It will be part of new versions of our software, and we are also discussing making it a stand-alone download.

Post by **wuhlei** » Sat Jan 26, 2008 4:22 am

cool what about software page flip?

Post by **CarlKenner** » Sun Jan 27, 2008 1:36 am

If a program talks about software page filp, you will need to read the program's instructions to find out what it really means.

If they mean the software is just rendering the left frame then just rendering the right frame, without telling anything which frame it is currently up to, but trying to keep it synced with the vertical retraces, then the bad news is... Vuzix disabled that feature in the firmware update, perhaps by accident, perhaps by miscommunication, or perhaps deliberately.

The good news is that once they release the SDK, I (or anyone else) can make a simple program that runs in the background and uses a timer to tell the glasses to switch eyes at 60Hz. Or I could make a program that hooks into the Direct3D present function so that it switches eyes every software frame, which would work more reliably.

Todd's comments aren't entirely clear, but I think what he is saying is this:

When using the nvidia stereo drivers, the graphics card sends a signal on one of the VGA pins to say which eye that frame is for, and the VR920 goes into nvidia stereo driver mode and strictly obeys the eye specified on that pin. So there is no need to manually swap which eye is which using the menu when in nvidia stereo driver mode. But you can still manually switch out of nvidia stereo driver mode if for some reason it doesn't do so automatically.

When using software that natively supports the VR920, it will only switch which eye the current frame goes to when told to via a USB command, and it will only display a frame once per eye switch. So if a program says "OK now do the left eye" and sends a frame to display, the VR920 will think "I didn't already have the left eye image, so I'm going to display this frame on the left screen." Then when the program sends another frame the VR920 will think "I've already got the left frame, so I'm just going to ignore this new frame." Then if the program says "OK now do the right eye", and sends a frame, the VR920 will think "I didn't already have the right eye image, so I'm going to display this frame on the right screen". Then if the program says "OK now do the left eye" and sends a frame to display, the VR920 will think "I didn't already have the left eye image, so I'm going to display this frame on the left screen.". There is therefore also no need to swap which eye is which manually in this mode. Although you might need to manually switch out of this mode if the program crashes before it sends a USB command to stop displaying stereo.

There used to be a third stereo mode which would just switch eyes once per frame and you could choose it from the menu. It would assume the first frame was for the left eye, then the next frame was for the right eye, then the next frame was the the left eye, etc. But sometimes it would get it backwards, and you would need to be able to specify that the first frame was for the right eye, the second for the left eye, and the third for the right eye, etc. So you needed to be able to manually choose L first or R first in the VR920's menu. But Vuzix stuffed up this mode by basically assuming it was the same as the stereo mode for native VR920 software.

Hopefully the third mode will be available again in the firmware update after the current one. But I wouldn't expect it in Release Candidate 2.

Post by **crim3** » Mon Jan 28, 2008 5:16 am

CarlKenner wrote:Or I could make a program that hooks into the Direct3D present function

How can it be done? How can an application change the behaviour of another direct3d application? I'm very interested in knowing where can I find information about that kind of things.
Is it related to the stereo drivers you are working on?

Post by **CarlKenner** » Mon Jan 28, 2008 8:01 am

I use MadCodeHooks whenever I want to hook into other people's Direct3D or OpenGL functions. It comes with a sample that makes all games render in wireframe, unless they want to render in wireframe in which case they render solid.
Like all good things, MadCodeHooks is written in Borland Delphi (pascal). But you can still use it from C if you haven't learnt to appreciate the wonders of pascal.

Post by **LukePC1** » Mon Jan 28, 2008 10:36 am

Great I learned a little delphi (and pascal). Is it open source, so you can see the code (and change it a little)?

Maybe it'd be possible to make 2 Frames out of one... who knows

Do you have a link?
--> I'll search for one myself, when I've got more time

Post by **CarlKenner** » Mon Jan 28, 2008 11:31 am

MadCodeHooks, which just does all kinds of hooking, isn't open source. You have to pay lots of money to buy the source. But you can use it for free yourself to play around with, and you can buy a non-commercial licence for a token price if you want to distribute non-commercial software made using it. It comes with a very simple sample code (without much comments) for hooking Direct3D to make it wireframe.

However hooking all of Direct3D (From 1 to 10) is a lot of work.

My code that I wrote for hooking all of Direct3D and doing head-tracked perspective hasn't been touched for ages, and it relies on being configured by editing the source code, and is full of bugs. I probably should stop messing around with DOSBOX and get a move on with working on it. But as my VR920 still has the old firmware and I'm too scared to update it, and Vuzix haven't released their stereo SDK yet, I could only implement anaglyph at the moment.