Stereo isn't enough for 3D

[CarlKenner]

We all love stereo 3D here, but stereo is not enough to make us truely inside the 3D world.

As soon as you move your head, the illusion is destroyed. Because parallax depth perceptions comes not just from 2 eyes, but mostly comes from moving your head.

The problem is that all games assume that they are just drawing a picture on a monitor, from a point and angle decided by the game, with a FOV decided by the game.

There are a few ways to actually enter the 3D world...
1. TrackIR style. This needs a headtracker capable of detecting fine rotations and translations. When you turn 20 degrees to the right to look at the side of your monitor, the in-game camera turns 180 degrees to the right. When you slide your head sideways a bit, the in-game camera slides sideways a bit. Kind of like a HMD, but it multiplies your head movements so that the screen doesn't actually need to move with you. Apparently this works well on a normal size monitor, but I haven't tried it.

2. CAVE style. This needs a headtracker capable of detecting position, but doesn't need rotation. It still uses a fixed screen and a head-tracker, but is totally the opposite of the TrackIR style. The monitor stops being attached to your virtual head. Instead the monitor becomes a fixed pane of glass like a window. When you move your head to the left, you can see objects to the right of the window. When you move your head to the right you can see objects that are to the left of the window. When you move your head closer to the window you can see a wide field of view, and when you move your head further away from the window you can only see a narrow part of the scene. This works best on a large monitor or screen, or on multiple monitors. On a small screen, some people have trouble with the metaphor, (although I still love it), and can't get used to thinking of the screen as a fixed window.

3. HMD style. This needs a headtracker capable of detecting rotation, although it is best to have position tracking too or you lose the head-parallax effect. You also need screens attached to your eyes, or just a laptop held in front of your head. This allows you to look around by actually looking around.

With the first two, they work best with multiple monitors, preferably big ones. In the cave style the monitors can be at different angles. All methods work best with stereo.

All this stuff can be done right now with consumer-level hardware. What is missing is software support, and a standard way of specifying which hardware to use and how your hardware is set up.

What games need to do to make this work is:

The 3D display driver needs to tell the game where to render the scene from, and what view and projection matrix to use, by passing the matrices to a render callback function. This callback function will be called once for each eye for each monitor.

The display driver also needs to use callbacks to initialise or shut down each graphics card, and each monitor attached to that graphics card.

The system also needs some standardised way of providing the game with user orientaton and input for navigation.

There needs to be a standard way of users specifying what hardware setup they have, and a layer so that applications don't have to worry about the hardware details. Monitor configuration, and the coordinates of the monitors and tracking devices are important for the CAVE style.

[sharky]

i don't know what other people think, but i think that we have to procede slowly and overcome first the problem "3D".. if we ask for to many standards and modifications in games we won't have any kind of success.

don't you agree with it?

bye

igor

[Freke1]

TrackIR is great but expensive. I play with ppl that use it. There are a lot of TrackIR videos on Youtube.

[Jahun]

Does TrackIR work in HL2?

And I mean, together with the mouse? No right?

That sucks, you can't aim with TrackIR ofcourse.. but it would be cool to have the head shift en rotation while gaming..

If it does work, let me know:)

[Freke1]

It works ok in FirstPersonShooters if the head can turn independently from the gun. I don't know if that's the case with HL2.