MTBS' Forums Now Support Stereoscopic 3D Pictures!

[Neil]

Over the past few weeks, Meant to be Seen has gone through some major upgrades. First, we transferred MTBS to a new server and upgraded all our software to the latest versions. In celebration of our fifth birthday, we did an overhaul of the site’s look and launched MTBS’ Birthday Bonanza contest. Most recently, we upgraded MTBS’ Gallery so you can view its images in stereoscopic 3D with modern solutions like AMD HD3D, Nvidia 3D Vision, Interlaced, Anaglyph, and more.

Since the beginning, our forums have been an important catalyst for helping grow the 3D gaming community. Unfortunately, as enthusiastic as our members are about 3D, the discussions were always limited to 2D expressions. It’s time for another industry first! Thanks to more creative work by Kirill Gavrilov, and some website debugging work by Andres Hernandez, MTBS’ forums now offer stereoscopic 3D support!

This functionality has been added in two parts. First, members can upload stereoscopic 3D images to MTBS’ Gallery. The gallery will accept images up to 3MB in size, and best results will be achieved in cross-eyed format (left image on the right).



Once the image is uploaded and on display in the gallery, click “Show BBCodes”. BBCode Thumbnail and BBCode Preview are two clickable thumbnail versions you can cut and paste into the forum. This isn’t in 3D, but it’s an easy way to show your pictures in the forum while allowing members to click to the full sized gallery version. You can copy and paste the text directly to your forum posts to get instant results.

[stimg url=http://www.mtbs3d.com/gallery/albums/ba ... C06_50.jpg]http://www.mtbs3d.com/gallery/albums/ba ... C06_50.jpg[/stimg]
BBcode stImg is where the magic happens. Copy and paste this text into your forum post, and when people read your message, they will see the 3D image inline with your post. While reading the forums, you will need sView installed for 3D image viewing. This plug-in works with Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome. This functionality doesn’t work with Internet Explorer yet.

There are some minor tradeoffs with this implementation. First, 3D Vision and HD3D users will need to view S-3D pictures in full screen mode. They are welcome to contact us if there is a workaround to this hardware limitation. In the meantime, this update is still a lot more convenient than downloading images in advance of viewing.

The other tradeoff is while the thumbnail BBCode functions will work on external websites wishing to link to our gallery, the stImg function will not. There is an HTML5 security feature preventing multiple domains from accessing the same content source, and we don’t have a way around it. In other words, the inline stereo viewing options are unique to MTBS’ 3D forums.

Enjoy! Please post bugs and enhancement ideas in the gallery forum.

Regards,
Neil