Stereoscopic 3D Gaming Cafe - Advice Needed Please

[Zimdictive]

I intend to start a stereoscopic 3D gaming cafe somewhere in London, England and am currently building a list of equipment to budget for a DIY installation.

I’m going to use dual projectors for a passive-polarised solution (so bystanders can witness the action, should they wish, by popping on a simple pair of not too unfashionable glasses) but I can’t decide which ones. I’d rather chose a 1080P LCD projector (onto 106” or so (probably) Harkness screens), but I’m having difficulty finding conclusive advice on whether 3LCD projectors can actually work in this setup. I’m going to run them with SPARs polarisers and there is conflicting information concerning these, some sites stating they work with any LCD projector, other stating this is far from the case. I consider lens-shift almost a necessity. And I’m going to run these projectors using Iz3D’s latest dual-output drivers because I believe them to be superior to Nvidia’s, and they also support ATi, whom, traditionally, I much prefer.

Though it isn’t of any particular relevance to the 3D side of things, I’m going to soundproof the (solid black) booth walls with specialist wall insulation, and run either 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound for each system. Alongside this I’ll probably implement rumble chairs, the 3rd Space Gaming Vest to emulate bullet impacts and fans to simulate character movement (all optional, of course, to the customer). High-res wired laser mice and Cherry keyboards are a must.

Starting out I’m aiming for eight booths (eventually moving onto twelve if there is sufficient demand) for four-a-side LAN matches, which will work well for games like Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike, etc, as well as most RTSs, but I’ll rent them individually as well for general single/multiplayer.

Tentatively, pricing will be comparable to that of a game of paintball.

Any advice would be appreciated – especially concerning the most central choice of projectors.

[Likay]

I use 2 Hitachi cp-x160 with spars and a 2000x1600mm silverscreen from former silverfabric. The projectors have 1024x768 pixels and 2500 a-lumens in high power mode. I'm always using the beamers in "economy" mode (2000 lumens) since the light is more than enough. The lightemission per squaremetre is even a little higher from the 100" screen than from my 19" samsung lcd-screen. It's a requirement that the projectors have the colors aligned in a special way to work with spars (or the similar stereobright filters). I didn't check this myself but when the filters arrived they worked splendid for my beamers. I ran them before with standard polarizerfilm aligned at 45/135° with no problem but with greater lightloss than with the spars.
In worst case you should be able to run the lcd-projectors with standard polarizationfilters. Colors from lcd beamers have different polarizationalignments so you'll not the freedom to align them 0/90°. 45/135° is probably a must.

My projectors don't have lenseshift but the image looks ok anyway (i need to use digital keystione though). I do run the games in a higher resolution (1280x960) than the projectors native because it looks better (keystone artifacts are removed).
Using native resolution and lenseshift will probably give a better image and also a performanceincrease.
I think Sharky is using spars and lcdbeamers but i'm not sure if he's got the rig in order yet.