3DLABS Oxygen 402 - Manual (Page 60)

54 Dynamic Pictures Oxygen 3D Family
Stereo 3D Technical Overview
Historically stereo has been a very expensive feature offered only on
highly specialized virtual reality systems, and high-end SGI UNIX (or
equivalent) systems. Now Dynamic Pictures brings stereo 3D to the PC.
High resolution stereo 3D is presented in “stereo pairs”, which are the
“left eye” and “right eye” frames required to see an image in full stereo
3D. Video output of the two images is double buffered left and right
views which must be output at the same refresh rate as the monocular
(or normal) image to avoid discernible flicker while operating in stereo
3D mode. This is a significant workload for a graphics card because
the output requires twice the number of scan lines displayed in the
same time interval. In other words, without employing any additional
techniques the board must output ‘twice as many pixels, twice as fast.”
To generate stereo 3D correctly, an accelerator board should be capable
of displaying the stereo pairs in a window. Oxygen is the only graphics
card that supports what is called true, full-page flipping, time-
multiplexed or field sequential stereo in an NT window. This window is
then “decoded” into the independent left and right views by Liquid
Crystal Display (LCD) shuttering glasses or similar devices. There are
methods of producing stereo that achieve faster frame rates but images
are “stretched” and suffer from diminished quality.
The Oxygen 402 3D graphics accelerator card has a connector that
enables the card to behave as a stereoscopic viewing system (Figure
24). Any OpenGL application that supports stereo 3D operation can
take advantage of this feature today. Viewing of stereo 3D images on
the monitor requires your Oxygen 402 card and an infrared emitter
with glasses. CrystalEyes® Oxygen™ is a complete solution that
combines the power of StereoGraphics' CrystalEyes with the award-
winning Dynamic Pictures Oxygen 3D graphics accelerators delivers
industry leading, high quality stereo 3D under Windows NT.
For more information regarding stereo 3D options, contact Dynamic
Pictures, Inc. at (408) 327-9000. For questions regarding your
CrystalEyes eyewear and emitter included with the CrystalEyes Oxygen
product, please contact StereoGraphics directly at (415) 459-4500.