Help testing Celestia in stereo?

[alexjt]

Hello Everyone,

This is my first post so I hope I'm not being a total noob with this request, but I'm not sure how else to figure this out. I don't have much hands-on experience with 3D stereoscopy, but like to think I am very well read on the subject, and have been lurking around the forums for a while now. My question has to do with a program called Celestia.

Celestia is a free, open-source, OpenGL-based 3d space simulator, and I would love to use it in a projected, stereoscopic setting for an educational project I'm working on. The problem is I'm not sure exactly what the best drivers/product would be to use for it. I want to use something other than anaglyph, because of color loss, and obviously the less ghosting the better. Of course, the inherent high contrast of stars in space make this probably unavoidable on a certain level. But I'll buy just about whatever works, within reason.

Nvidia's 3D technology, although expensive, would be my first choice, but my understanding is they have little to no OpenGL support. I was wondering if anyone on the forums would be willing to try it out on their setups and see if anyone can get it to work for say, shutterglasses or passive polarized glasses? Even if you're not interested in helping out, I think it's a cool enough program that everyone should check it out! The website is at http://www.shatters.net/celestia/index.html

Thanks in advance!
-Alex

[Fredz]

I think it would be a good idea to test with anaglyph glasses first, this way you'll know if it's going to work with other types of glasses. You could especially pay attention to ghosting, depth perception for the long distances between planets and the type of rendering used (bump mapping, normal mapping, etc.).

You've got several possibilities for testing :
- a NVIDIA graphics card and the 3D Vision driver with GLDirect ;
- XP with an old NVIDIA graphics card (< Geforce 7950) and the old NVIDIA stereo driver ;
- the iZ3D or Tridef driver with any graphics card.

If that works, you can upgrade your system to obtain something like this :



Yes, it's Celestia... An adaptation of it in fact. See : http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2166" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[cybereality]

IZ3D has Quadbuffer OpenGL support but the application has to support it. I believe TriDef is DirectX only.

[Fredz]

Isn't quad buffer OpenGL exposed in Quadro card only concerning NVIDIA ? Did ATI already made their quad buffer available to third parties like iZ3D ?

[alexjt]

Thanks for the replies! Actually, I was aware that stereo ports have been made before, but I've never got replies to my emails from the makers. That particular one is in the glass environment, and I think I'd rather stick with something a little more understandable as I'm not really looking to get into distributed computing. Oh, the eye candy is tantalizing though!

It seems this somewhat confirms that an Nvidia card setup of some kind will be my best bet for getting this to work without modifying the source code...then again, maybe I'll have to go there. I made a post in the thread you linked to earlier, asking if anyone is willing to test it out for me (before i spend my allowances on something that might not work) Any other ideas for people I might be able to rope into doing me a favor?

Again thanks for the responses, I think I'm slowly being nudged in the right directions!