3D Vision Blog

The Eye 3D is a 3D documentary about the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the most powerful optical telescope in the world that has found its place in one of the most exciting regions of this planet: Chile’s Atacama desert, 75 miles away from any settlement. The Eye 3D is a journey: To the Atacama desert and further to the outmost depths of the universe. The short 2 and a half minute stereo 3D demo of the clip you can download was made available by Peter Wimmer, the author of the Stereoscopic Player. The video is in 16:9, 1080p HD format with WMV compression in Over/Under format and can be viewed with the 3D Vision Video player, Sterescopic Player or any other that supports Above/Below format for S3D video.

On a side note you can also download The Stereoscopic Player Version 1.5.6 if you are using the player as it includes some fixes over version 1.5.5, although it is still not listed at the authors website, it is there for download. You can click on this link to download the Stereoscopic Player 1.5.6. The links below are for the short S3D demo of the Eye 3D documentary, the video file is about 600MB in size, so it can take some time to download. And don’t forget to share your comments about the video if you download and watch it…

- Download the Eye 3D short stereo 3D movie – mirror 1 – mirror 2 – torrent file

More interesting news coming from GDC 2010 in San Francisco, this time from ATI announcing their Open Stereo 3D Initiative in trying to work with more partners to ensure support for multiple different stereoscopic 3D solutions (learning that thanks to MTBS3D, not from ATI!). The idea of the open initiative is to offer consumers additional choices when selecting an S3D solution, more innovations and of course help in lowering the costs for the hardware and software making it easier for wider adoption. ATI (AMD) and its partners will supposedly soon announce a lineup of 3D products, including a 3D-enabled ATI Eyefinity technology (to counter Nvidia’s 3D Vision Surround), 120Hz 3D-ready displays and notebooks, active shutter glasses and passive polarized ones (have you heard of passive shutter glasses!?), S3D support for DirectX 9, 10 and 11, Quad Buffered OpenGL, Blu-ray 3D support. As you can see from the presentation slide above the 3D-gaming middleware partners are DDD and iZ3D, and for Blu-ray 3D support ArcSoft and CyberLink. ATI is also going to try to work on establishing standards that will help in having compatibility and much wider choices when building your computer and stereo 3D setup if they are adopted by others. The only thing that still remains to be seen is how soon we are going to see actual products on the market as ATI has been talking about S3D support for quite some time, but still no dates when to expect it are available… although we have multiple hints about summer availability. But being so open I still don’t see ATI joining the S-3D Gaming Alliance like two of their major partners that will make stereo 3D gaming possible on ATI GPUs (iZ3D and DDD) or any other association that is trying to openly promote stereoscopic 3D technologies?! But for that matter Nvidia is also not a member of S3DGA or any other similar independent organizations, as far as I know…

Nvidia and Epic Games just announced the addition of official support for the stereoscopic 3D technology called 3D Vision in the latest Unreal Engine 3. This announcement means that licensees of the Unreal Engine 3 will be able to take full advantage of integrated 3D Vision support by offering games that not only look great, but also handle very well when played in stereoscopic 3D mode. The best news is that even the popular Unreal Development Kit (UDK), a free version of Unreal Engine 3, will also offer support for 3D Vision. The updated version of Unreal Engine 3 and UDK (the march beta does not include it!) will be available in the near future, allowing games developed with that revision (or later one) to deliver “out of the box” support for 3D Vision. Meanwhile the latest version of nreal Engine 3 with 3D Vision support is being demonstrated at the Game Developers Conference currently held in San Francisco, so if you are interested you can visit and see a demo of the engine in stereoscopic 3D mode. And while the announcement is only about 3D Vision support for the latest Unreal Engine 3 it will most likely work without any significant issues with other stereoscopic 3D solutions currently available.

- To visit the official website of the free UDK (the free Unreal Engine 3 development kit)…