3d glasses question

OpenGL OpenGL: Basic Coding
1

Hi
I know it is possible to do red and blue stereo views on OpenGL, but I have a question on polorized 3d glasses: the ones with polorized lenses and that one is turned 90 degrees from the other, not LCD shutter glasses. I have seen it done on a computer monitor and also on projectors, I just want to know if it is possible to do it using OpenGL. I don’t know if the projector or monitor that i have seen it being demonstrated on had special hardware to let them produce polorized images or not. If you have info on this I would like to know more about it.

Thank you

2

I checked for a monitor that produced polarized images without shutter glasses and was not able to find anything. There is however a monitor in development that uses Auto-stereostopic lenticular based 3d with head-tracking. It is in development currently and I imagine it will cost a pretty penny when it is released.

The only options available currently that I know of are Analglyphic(red/cyan stereo pairs), Shutter glasses, and Helmets.

To your question, OpenGL is not in and of itself capable of rendering true 3-d images. In the case of Red/Cyan Analglyphs, if your video card supports it, use the PFD_STEREO in your Pixel Format Descriptor. If that is not available then you will need to render your scene twice, once with only the Red component, and again with the Green & Blue components using-

void glColorMask(
GLboolean red,
GLboolean green,
GLboolean blue,
GLboolean alpha
);

If you are using shutter glasses, you may be able to use the pfd setting if your video card supports it(I’m not too clear on this one), but if not, you will probably need to get some special drivers, or library from the card manufacturer, or the shutter glasses manufacturer.

3

You will need a filter that goes over your screen for th polarizing glasses. You can get one from stereographics. With regard to quad buffering (i.e. double buffered for left and right) only some cards will support this, we use an oxygen vx1. We only use flat images (in stereo pairs) so dont need to worry about getting theperspective stuff right. Taks a look at these pages…
http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/pbourke/opengl/stereogl/ (gives the
code for OpenGl based display)
www.stereographics.com/ (has a nice developers handbook and
lots of source code and examples)

gav