3D Vision Blog

The First SD&A Stereoscopic Games Competition to be Held in 2014

Bloody — Sat, 04 May 2013 10:43:24 +0000

The Stereoscopic Displays and Applications Conference has just announced that they will be holding the first SD&A Stereoscopic Game Competition at the February 2014 conference in downtown San Francisco. No, this is not a stereoscopic 3D game playing competition, instead the aim of the competition is to encourage the creative use of stereoscopic depth in exciting new game designs. A panel of expert judges will review the game designs and the winner will receive a cash prize of $1000. Games will be judged at the conference, however the game, or a video of the game, and a 500 word introduction must be submitted two months before the conference start. You must also register your interest in entering the competition not later than 22nd of July, 2013. The SD&A 2014 conference will run 3-5 February 2014 at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square hotel, USA.

- For more information about the upcoming SD&A Stereoscopic Games Competition…

TriDef 3D Special Version for The iRacing Online Racing Simulator

Bloody — Sat, 04 May 2013 10:33:48 +0000

Usually when you want to play games in stereo 3D mode you get all the required hardware and software in order to be able to play as many games as available and working well in stereo 3D mode, however there are exceptions. One such exception is if you only play an online racing simulator such as iRacing and you need to make it more realistic by playing in stereoscopic 3D mode. DDD has released a special limited version of their TriDef 3D package that is especially meant only for players racing in the iRacing online racing simulator. The TriDef 3D for iRacing will only support tht game and is available for $4.99 USD, it will work with Line Interlaced (FPR) displays, HDMI 1.4 3D TVs/monitors (if your graphics card supports AMD HD3D) and Anaglyph glasses. Of course if you already have a full TriDef 3D license you can also play the game in stereoscopic 3D mode, furthermore the online racing game iRacing is also supported by 3D Vision with an Excellent rating for the stereoscopic 3D compatibility it offers. Have in mind that the iRacing online racing simulator is not a free game, it is a subscription-based title.

- For more information about the TriDef 3D for iRacing special product license…

GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost vs Radeon HD 7790 in Stereo 3D Mode

Bloody — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:08:06 +0000

Time for a comparison as promised in the post about the new GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost GPU that looks very promising as an affordable solution for people willing to play in stereo 3D mode at a resolution of 720p. The direct competitor for the GTX 650 Ti Boost is the Radeon HD 7790, so I took one of these cards and compared the results it provides in 720p stereo 3D mode using the latest TriDef 3D driver to the results of the GTX 650 Ti Boost using 3D Vision. I’ve also compared both cards in 1080p 2D mode with the same games, because the Radeon HD 7790 is also a good option for people with tighter budgets that want to be able to get high detail levels at 1080p resolution in non-stereoscopic 3D mode, just like the GTX 650 Ti Boost is.

Starting with 720p stereoscopic 3D results, you ca clearly see that apart from Far Cry 3 where the average framerate is very close for both cards and the game Tomb Raider where the Radeon is slightly faster in the other games the GTX 650 Ti Boost performs significantly better. The reason for that is the fact that the TriDef 3D driver is not as efficient performance wise as compared to the 3D Vision, so you might want to consider a slightly faster Radeon video card than the 7790 for playing in stereoscopic 3D mode at 720p resolution or sacrifice some of the detail levels and go for lower settings. Another interesting things that has turned out is the weird out of video memory message that we’ve got when trying to run Resident Evil 6 with TriDef on the Radeon HD 7790, apparently the 1GB video memory that the card had on-board was not enough.

Moving to 1080p non stereoscopic 3D tests the results turn out completely opposite than what we’ve had for the 720p stereo 3D tests. Here in Crysis 3 and Dead Space 3 the Radeon is a bit slower, the average framerate is the same in Bioshock and in the other three games the Radeon is faster. SO while both the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost and the Radeon HD 7790 offer very good performance for playing games in 1080p resolution with high detail levels, the Radeon might be the slightly better choice. At the same time the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost is definitely the better choice for stereoscopic 3D gaming at 720p resolution.

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost Does Well With 720p S3D

Bloody — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:00:38 +0000

Last year when Nvidia released the GeForce GTX 650 Ti it has turned out to be a decent budget card for 720p stereo 3D gaming that could also perform well in 1080p 2D mode, though with some compromises in details and no AA filtering for the higher resolution. Recently Nvidia has released an updated version of the GTX 650 Ti, the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost, a new GPU that promises a bit better performance and some extra features. If you remember the GTX 650 Ti did not support Boost Clock and SLI and the new GTX 650 Ti Boost model adds support for these and though the number of CUDA cores remains the same, there are a few extra ROPs, and the GPU is running with a bit higher frequency along with a wider memory bus and faster memory.

Specifications of GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost:

CUDA Cores – 768
Graphics Clock – 980 MHz ⁺⁵⁵
Boost Clock – 1033 MHz
Texture Fill Rate – 62.7 GigaTexels/sec ^+3.5
Standard Memory Configuration – 2048 MB GDDR5 ^+1024MB
Memory Interface Width – 192-bit ⁺⁶⁴
Memory Clock – 3000 MHz (6000 MHz effective) ^{+300 (600)}
Memory Bandwidth – 144.2 GB/sec ^+57.8
Texture Units (TMU) – 64
Raster Operator Units (ROP) – 24 ⁺⁸
Power connectors – 1x 6-pin PEG
Power consumption – 134W TDP ⁺²⁴
GPU Thermal Threshold – 105 degrees Celsius ^-7

* The numbers in red and green represent the upgrade or downgrade of the specific parameter in the GTX 650 Ti Boost as compared to the GTX 650 Ti!

The stereo 3D benchmark results above were achieved on a mid-range computer – Biostar A960A3+ motherboard, AMD FX 4130 quad core processor, 4GB RAM and Windows 7 64-bit, together with a reference GTX 650 Ti Boost graphics card all of which were not overclocked. Testing on a few of the more recent and popular games in both stereoscopic 3D mode at 1280×720 resolution with high details and at 1080p resolution in non stereoscopic mode has shown very promising results, but you should forget about being able to play in 1920×1080 resolution in stereo 3 mode with this video card. I still recommend as a minimum for 1080p S3D gaming a GTX 660 Ti video card in order for you to have a good framerate and get a good overall experience when gaming with 3D Vision. Thanks to the SLI support that the GTX 650 Ti Boost however the option to use two of these cards in SLI might also be an interesting alternative to using a single GTX 660 Ti. Also enabling AA filtering at 720p resolution isn’t as taxing as on 1080p resolution in terms of performance drop, so you can get better quality without significant fps drop in order to compensate for the lower resolution.

As you can see you are also not going to have trouble playing most games in 1080p resolution in non-stereoscopic mode with high detail levels, though in some more demanding games you might have to sacrifice a bit to get more comfortable framerate. So if you are looking for a GPU in the price range of the GTX 650 Ti, then you should go instead for the replacement GTX 650 Ti Boost mode. It has enough performance for stereo 3D gaming at 720p resolution on a 3D HDTV for example and it also works quite well in 1080p 2D resolution for most games with the High detail levels. Again if you want a card capable of providing comfortable framerates for stereoscopic 3D gaming at 1080p resolution for a 3D Vision monitor you should start from something like GTX 660 Ti as a minimum.

Coming up next is to see how does the GTX 650 Ti Boost compare to the competition in the face of the AMD Radeon HD 7790 graphics that is in the same price range of about $150 USD and should be offering very similar performance…

Adding a Web Camera to the Oculus Rift Can be Quite Helpful

Bloody — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:11:20 +0000

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been playing mostly with the Oculus Rift Dev Kit since I’ve got my unit and the good thing is that even though so far only about 2K development kits were shipped the community is very active and there are new development around the Rift all the time. Now, since the Rift covers your vision completely and when you put on headphones for the sound you kind of get completely cut off from the “real world”, and though that this has advantages it also brings some disadvantages. Like having a hard time finding the keyboard or the mouse on your desk without taking off the Rift, so I’ve decided to see what can we do to easily get around this problem. The solution is actually quite simple – add a webcam with a wide angle lens so that when you are wearing the Rift you can switch to the camera and see your desk or what is happening around you. I’ve had a suitable webcam around and by replacing the standard lens with a wider angle one I got this simple and easy to use solution working almost perfectly.

I’ve mounted the camera with Velcro in the center of the Rift and then fired up the Stereoscopic Player with Live Video mode on and the monoscopic camera input set to output using the Oculus Rift viewing method. The web camera is with 640×480 resolution and 30 fps and that seems to work quite well, it also has a set of LEDs for use in dark environments (including a set of IR LEDs) and plugs via USB, it also has a microphone, though I was not able to make it work under Stereoscopic Player. Now, you can easily extend this solution by adding two web cameras f the same model on your Rift to get a stereoscopic 3D video input with the help of the Stereoscopic Multiplexer dual-camera capture solution developers by Peter Wimmer, the author of the Stereoscopic Player. You need to run the Stereoscopic Player in full-screen mode and you can switch between it and the currently running Oculus Rift-compatible game or application by the key combination ALT + TAB. The only drawback here is that you need to be able to hit the key combination, but you can thing of something more creative to be mapped to that combination to make it easier two switch between the two. It works surprisingly well and is a modification that everyone should be able to easily make, even with two cameras for stereo 3D video input (placed at the right distance based on your IPD), the key thing is to use a wider angle lenses instead of the standard ones that would probably be with a narrower angle.

If we get integrated stereo camera solution with an easy to activate overlay or switch between the camera input and application input or combining them both in a future version the Oculus Rift it would also be able to become a device capable not only of VR with stereo 3D support, but for AR applications as well. Meanwhile, the next thing to try out for me is to get rid of all the cables and make the Oculus Rift completely mobile and wirelessly connected to the PC – the display and the headtracker, along with suitable wireless controllers and wireless headphones as well powered by a battery and all inside a backapack on the user’s back. This however would probably take some more time to complete…

2D and 3D Video Playback on the Rift with the Stereoscopic Player

Bloody — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:43:45 +0000

Even though the main focus of the Oculus Rift is virtual reality experiences, many users would also want to be able to use this HMD device for other simpler things like playback of 2D and 3D video as well. The good news is that the latest version 2.0.5 of the Stereoscopic Player released earlier this month brought support for 2D and 3D video playback on the Rift, of course there is no support for the head tracker, but you don’t need it for video playback anyway. To enable the right viewing mode just select Oculus Rift in the Settings under the Playback Options panel and the videos you open either in 2D (monoscopic) or in 3D mode (stereoscopic) will be rendered with the correct optical distortion required by the Rift.

The playback of both 2D and stereo 3D videos with the Stereoscopic Player on the Rift works quite well with 3D videos obviously being more impressive than the flat 2D ones that just show the same image for each eye. A stereo 3D video with more depth can look quite impressive when viewed with the Oculus Rift. The only drawback however is that when viewing 1080p 3D videos they need to be scaled down and there is quite a lot of vertical screen space left unused because of the wide aspect. As a result you may be able to notice the top and bottom edges of the video frame when watching the video with the Rift, so have that in mind.

- To download the latest version 2.0.5 of the Stereoscopic Player with Oculus Rift support…

Some More Interesting Oculus Rift Development Kit Updates

Bloody — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 20:41:34 +0000

The team at Oculus has reported that they’ve managed to ship roughly 1850 development kits worldwide so far (out of which 500 internationally) with another ~2000 arriving at doorsteps around April 26th, but it could be a few days earlier or later depending on international customs. Of the upcoming ~2000 unit batch, ~500 will be shipped to Europe, ~500 will be for Asia/Oceania, and the rest will be to the Americas. These units will also be the first delivered via the new EU/Asia/Oceania fulfillment network, which should help reduce delivery times and costs. So it will take some time until all of the 10K+ units get shipped. Fortunately I’ve already got my unit, even though I’m based in Europe, the early backers with DIY kits like me apparently had priority. The Oculus Kickstarter t-shirts and posters are also ready and should be shipping worldwide starting next week (shipped separately from the dev kits).

Meanwhile iFixit have made a teardown of the Rift, so if you are interested in finding out what is inside the Rift you might want to take a look at their complete Teardown of the Oculus Rift. This can save you the need of having to disassemble your unit if you are curious or if you plan to mod something on your Rift and are not sure if your modification will be possible, or if it will fit in.

And here is another teardown of the Rift, this time on video, made by Michael Moffitt. On his website you can find something else that might be of interest for Oculus Rift owners, an Oculus Rift USB power hack that would allow you to run the Rift off USB power only without the need of the extra power adapter, making the Rift more portable and having to use less cables. Be warned that you may face issues with this mode on some USB ports if you have other peripheral devices connected that tend to draw more power.

My Oculus Rift Development Kit is Available for Demonstrations

Bloody — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:02:14 +0000

If you are interested in the Oculus Rift, but have not yet ordered a development kit you are probably wiling to try it out before making a final decision, just have in mind that we are talking about a product intended for developers and VR enthusiasts and not for consumers (yet). As promised my Oculus Rift dev kit is available for everyone willing to try it out and who happens to be living in Bulgaria, or in a nearby country or passes by Sofia. I’ve setup a system with some of the available demos and below is the address where the Oculus Rift demo is located in Sofia, Bulgaria (Europe).

You can try the Rift at this address:

- Lozenec, Lipa 17A str., ap. 1
- Sofia, 1421
- Bulgaria
- Google Map

And for other locations around the world there is already a community of users that are receiving their development kits of the Oculus Rift that also are willing to demonstrate them to others in their regions.

- Find other locations and users on this map where you can also see the Rift….

My First Impressions from the Oculus Rift Development Kit

Bloody — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 20:47:32 +0000

After I’ve had a day to test out and play with my Oculus Rift dev kit I’m ready to share some of the first impressions I’ve got from the device by trying out some of the still very few demos available as well as the first game that supports it – Team Fortress 2. Since I do wear prescription glasses as I’m a bit nearsighted, with -1.25 diopters what seemed to work best with the Rift was the middle B set of lenses as the A set produces a blurry image for me and the C set is a bit too much. I’ve also tested trying to fit my prescription glasses inside the Rift as they are pretty compact in size (the do fit inside), the effect I get with them inside using the A set is pretty much the same as when using the B set without the glasses. I prefer to use the B set of lenses as it is more comfortable than to try to wear my glasses inside the rift and if you wear larger prescription glasses you may have trouble fitting them inside. You should have in mind that wearing glasses when using the Rift or using the B and C sets of lenses does lead to a slight reduction in the FOV you get. So people with normal vision or if wearing contact lenses with the A set will probably get the best experience in terms of largest FOV achievable, though the difference in the FOV with the B/C sets visually is not that much noticeable.

So after setting up the dev kit with the right lenses it was time to try it out. Obviously the first thing to do when you get your development kit is to register at the Oculus Developer Center (if you still haven’t) and to download the Oculus Tuscany Demo to try out the Rift and this is exactly what I did. As soon as I put on the Rift and started the demo the WOW effect was there, the large FOV you get and the image covering your vision well enough surely makes it feel great. The immersion is very good and the responsiveness of the headtracker makes the head movements result in very natural movement of the image on the screen. A few seconds after that however you may start to notice the not so good things, such as the low resolution (roughly about 580×580 pixels per eye used in TF2 for example) – looking at the Oculus Rift LCD display without the lenses it looks great in terms of detail, but since the lenses zoom it you can clearly see the pixels. So a higher resolution display is indeed a must have for the consumer version of the device, though if you stop paying too much attention to the pixels you can still enjoy what you get. For me personally the lower resolution wasn’t actually the biggest issue, what bothers me more is the motion blur around objects while I move my head around (probably due to slower pixel response time), the blur is not so apparent when looking around with the mouse or moving with the keyboard. This means that it could be possible to improve the situation with just a software update by further improving the translation of the head tracker movements to the image being rendered on the display. Some people may not notice the motion blur that much or it may not bother them as much, but for me it is a bit of a problem, and it probably results in me getting a slight nausea when moving with the keyboard and moving my head looking around. Strangely enough I get nausea fairly quickly only in the Oculus Tuscany Demo and not in any other of the demos I’ve tried or in TF2 (or at least not as fast as in the Tuscany Demo), though I do notice the motion blur in them as well.

The other demos that I’ve tried and that you may want to try out if you still haven’t include the: Space Station Explorer that looks quite well, though not very “playable” yet, the Ogre Oculus that is Ok, even though it does not work very well and is not very complete yet, but the most impressive demo for the moment seems to be the Museum of the Microstar – Oculus Rift Edition. These demos can give you an idea on what to expect and allow you to explore various “virtual worlds” to give you an idea what is possible with the Rift, but you’d want to give Team Fortress 2 a try, it is a free to play game and is currently the only game available to actually feature support for the Rift. The Doom 3 BFG Edition or the Hawken that have Rift support announced are still not yet available to be played with the final version of the Rift dev kits. There is a detailed guide for TF2 on how to enable VR mode in the game. I’ve had a weird problem at first getting an error that the tracker is not being detected, even though it was running fine in the other demos – moving the USB cable from the USB 3.0 port it was connected to to another USB 2.0 has resolved the issue and the game ran fine after that. Playing TF2 with the Rift feels a bit strange at first and requires a bit of getting used to as unlike with the demos here you need to shoot at the enemies. The game works quite well after you get the hang of controlling it, though using the developer console and reading some texts is a it problematic due to the lower image resolution. I still haven’t played with most of the advanced options available in the game, but even the default setup works quite well for me.

I’m sure that many of you are also interested in the stereoscopic 3D experience that the Rift provides. The focus of the stereoscopic 3D support with the Rift is making things seem realistic, that is why by default the settings for the stereoscopic 3D rendering are intended to make virtual objects seem realistic in proportions. And while this works quite well in the demos, they may seem a bit flat for people sued to playing games in stereoscopic 3D mode with a lot of depth – not intended to provide realistic proportions, but just to have a lot of depth. So if realism is your goal, it works quite well even now, though the lower resolution is a bit of a drawback here as well, but virtual reality does not need to always be true to real things, it can be used to provide “unreal” experiences as well. I suppose it can take some time for developers to pick up on stereoscopic 3D support for the Rift to be able to use it as best as possible and also to give adequate user control over the depth levels. From the currently available supported software I cannot say I’m impressed by the stereoscopic 3D support as much as by the VR experience, though both work well together.

Another thing to note, not so bothering, but still a bit of an issue are the color aberrations around objects that can be seen closer to the edges of the lenses, and further improvement to the lenses and the image distortion algorithm could also help in reducing these. By default the display is set to pretty low Brightness of 0 and Contrast setting of 50 and you may want to bring the Contrast even a bit lower as the image can still be quite bright at times, no point in bringing it higher. What you should also be careful about is to keep the lenses clean and not to allow dust to enter inside and fall on the screen as it looks like large dead pixels on the display when you put on the Rift and these are hard to clean. I’ve had a few times the lenses fogging up after some time of use (I guess my face got sweaty). The weight of the unit is Ok and you quickly can get used to wearing it without being bothered at all, though the side straps needed a bit of adjusting in order not to cover my ears so I can use headphones, also the cable between the control unit and the display could be made more flexible.

After trying all of the above demos and TF2 I can say I’m quite pleased with the results and how well the Rift works in overall, lets not forget that this is still a developer kit and it is intended to help developers get to know how to work on VR applications supporting the device and be ready to have them running great with a further improved consumer version. The Rift shows a great potential, even though there are areas that need improvement in order to provide even better user experience, the headtracking is good, but we still need improvement in the display as well as further tweaking the software and improving the support. The Oculus Rift is much better in terms of immersion as compared to all other HDM devices that I’ve tried so far, mostly due to the larger FOV it provides and with a bit more improvement and refining it can really lead to bringing affordable virtual reality experiences to everyone. For now however, unless you are a software developer or an enthusiast interested in researching or programming VR applications you’d probably want to wait for the consumer version of the Rift. If you are a normal consumer and have the chance of trying out the Oculus Rift developer kit you should give it a try, but probably it will not be a good idea to order a kit yourself, better wait for the improved consumer version and for more content supporting the Rift to become available.

The Waiting is Finally Over, I Just Got my Oculus Rift Dev Kit

Bloody — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 09:31:36 +0000

It seems that at the moment the shipping process of the first dev kits of the Oculus Rift is a bit of a mess. The team at Oculus started shipping the first units already, but it seemed that they were only shipping to US/Canada with the international orders expected to start shipping a bit later on. My order number was 142 and the online system still says my order is being processed for shipping and I just got back from the customs after clearing my Oculus Rift dev kit. It has been shipped on 28th of March and arrived yesterday wit UPS and I’m based in Europe. Now I’m off to trying the kit out and you can expect my first impressions a bit later, I’ll also publish additional information when and where you would be able to try out dev kit if you are interested in it and happen to be living or passing by Sofia, Bulgaria.

3D Vision Blog

The First SD&A Stereoscopic Games Competition to be Held in 2014

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TriDef 3D Special Version for The iRacing Online Racing Simulator

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GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost vs Radeon HD 7790 in Stereo 3D Mode

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The Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost Does Well With 720p S3D

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Adding a Web Camera to the Oculus Rift Can be Quite Helpful

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2D and 3D Video Playback on the Rift with the Stereoscopic Player

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Some More Interesting Oculus Rift Development Kit Updates

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My Oculus Rift Development Kit is Available for Demonstrations

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My First Impressions from the Oculus Rift Development Kit

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The Waiting is Finally Over, I Just Got my Oculus Rift Dev Kit

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