Introduction

No doubt many of you have seen stereoscopic 3D glasses before. Most have a high price tag and connect through the VGA or Stereo port on your VGA card. Metabyte makes some of these glasses themselves. However, they now have a $12.95 product to produce stereoscopic images on your PC using standard Red/Blue 3D glasses.

How It Works

The trick to getting 3D views out of a 2D image is to send a separate image to each eye. These images are slightly different and when viewed together, it gives the picture depth. There are many ways to accomplish this. Most of you will remember the old Matel Viewers. You would look through the device and each eye saw a different slide. You could cycle through pictures of Big Bird, Burt and Ernie, or your favorite superhero. Separating the views was no problem because each eye was isolated in the viewfinder. This form of stereoscopic viewing works great but is not a viable solution for a computer monitor.

The way the more expensive 3D glasses work is by way of shutters. The stereo glasses are connected to your VGA output and work in unison with the refresh rate of your monitor. The driver included with this type of system interlaces the image displayed by a game. The glasses have shutters built into the lenses which alternate with each refresh of the monitor. When one lens is shut, the other is open. The image displayed on the screen will alternate with the opening and closing of the independent shutters. This solution is very effective because it does not alter the color of the game and the two images are very isolated from the two eyes. However, these glasses are a bit expensive and you need to drive your monitor at a high refresh rate or you will get an enormous headache.

The last solution is perhaps one of the most common forms of stereoscopic viewing. We have seen these Red/Blue glasses in old comic books, Nintendo games, and 3D Movies. What Metabyte has done is create a driver that separates objects in the game into different colored views. The Red/Blue lenses act as filters so that one eye won't see the red images and one eye won't see the blue images. This form of viewing is not as accurate as the previous described. However, it is a very cheap means of getting stereoscopic images.

Installation/Config

Upon installation of eyeSCREAM light, the program searches for compatible games and installs a miniport GL driver for them. As of now, only OpenGL games are supported. I don't know if Metabyte plans on releasing a DirectX version of the program. For a list of supported games, visit Wicked3D's site. Once the games are enabled with the stereo driver, you can set a few options in the driver config screen. The first and most important is "Stereo effect strength". There are four settings ranging from 25-100% stereo effect. Metabyte recommends that you start out with a low setting and work your way up to 100% stereo effect. Trust me on this one, don't start out with 100%. There is also a "3D aiming help" setting which will replace the crosshair in the game with one provided by the driver in case you get a ghosting effect with the game's crosshair.

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