3D Vision Blog

NVS has made her music video debut with Panasonic at the 2010 NAB show in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. Panasonic has used their 3D technology – the Panasonic AG-3DA1 3D Camcorder to capture NVS in her very first music video featuring her soon to be released single “Right Side”. The video is available in stereo format over at YouTube 3D and you can also download the 720p version from the links below. If you download the video you need to open it with the 3D Vision Video Player or the Stereoscopic Player in a Side by Side format with 16:9 aspect ratio. The quality is not the best, but still Ok and you can see how well does the Panasonic AG-3DA1 camcorder does it job in capturing video in 3D. You can also watch the 2D version of the music video of Right Side over at YouTube as it is a bit different from the stereo 3D clip. Don’t forget to leave your comments if you watch the video in 3D and you can also visit official NVS website…

- Download the music video in Stereo 3D – mirror 1

A few days ago I written a short article with information about upcoming interesting games that you should watch for and that might be really nice when played in stereo 3D mode with 3D Vision or another 3D setup. One of the games I’ve mentioned, and one that already came out is Split / Second, but unfortunately it is a bit of disappointment in terms of stereo 3D support, the game however is actually quite good if you are into racing action games (this is not a racing simulator!).

It is hard to get the game to have a bit of pop-out and good depth at the same time. One of the reasons for that is that the menu is more “in front” while the game itself is more for depth, so in the end the most comfortable overall convergence settings are for depth only. The other reason is that you start to get ghosting and the backgound gets too much separation that it is impossible to focus on the sky or the mountains in the back. Below you can find my tweaked convergence settings to try, but as I said they are optimized for overall depth throughout the game (the menu and the gameplay) and with them you need to set the depth level to minimum.

The game has some problems with the shadows and reflections and you need to go to Low detail mode for the reflections to get disabled, but then the game does not look very impressive. There are also some elements rendered in 2D, like for example the icons you see for the power attacks over your opponents, so they seem to be at the wrong depth. The options menu is quite limited to resolution and detail level, no settings for individual options are present like reflections or shadows. The game saves a configuration file in the Documents folder, but it is not in plain text, so you cannot edit it easily in order to change setting manually. Sometimes I do hate games that were not done quite right for the PC, because too much attention has gone on the console versions and then they decided to do a half decent port for the computer gamers… a negative point here for Split Second. Another thing when talking about that is the fact that the game seems to be capped at 30 FPS, no matter if you enable or disable the Vsync…

On the Very High detail level, the graphics looks quite good in 2D (plain 3D) mode, and the game gets quite heavy actually (better have a Fermi GPU standing by, and I really do mean that!). Split Second could’ve benefited a lot from the stereo 3D if it was working right out of the box, but unfortunately for 3D Vision users it is not. So now we can hope for improvement in the stereo 3D compatibility with an upcoming patch, and until them you better stick to playing the game normally and not in stereo 3D mode. Meanwhile if you get the game and try it in stereo 3D mode with 3D Vision and the custom convergence settings below, please leave your comment on how they work for you…

- To download my custom convergence settings for the game Split Second…

Update: I’ve also tried the game on the iZ3D Monitor with the latest non-beta (1.10) iZ3D Driver and things here are a bit better, shadows and reflections are rendered Ok. But still you cannot get higher depth levels otherwise the background gets messier and you start seeing ghosting, so you need to stay on low depth levels. So you can say that the stereo 3D is a bit better with iZ3D than with 3D Vision, but it seems that the game runs better on Nvidia GPUs than on ATI GPUs. With Radeon 5970 on Very High detail level I was having trouble playing comfortable in plain 3D mode, and simply not enough fps for stereo 3D mode, on High with the 5970 in stereo 3D the game manages to stay above 25 fps (it is capped at 30 fps anyway). At the same time with 3D Vision I was able to play comfortable on High even with a GTX 260 in stereo 3D mode, but for Very High details in S3D a Fermi would probably be needed as I already said. Anyway, I’d still say that Split Second is not the best game for playing in stereo 3D mode, and I prefer to play it in plain 3D mode as I quite liked the game, although there are some annoying moments related to the game not being ported for the PC quite well.

Zalman is now offering two new Full HD 3D passive polarized monitors in its like of Trimon products. The older 19-inch model ZM-M190 is now discontinued and the bigger one ZM-M220W will probably follow soon. These first two models were using a special version of Nvidia’s stereoscopic drivers, but for its two new models Zalman is not going to use the Nvidia drivers anymore. Instead the new Zalman ZM-M215W and ZM-M240W will come bundled with the iZ3D Driver, but they can also work with DDD’s TriDef software and probably with just about any other software that can output in row-interleaved 3D format. Below you can find the specifications for the two new passive polarized displays from Zalman, and they are passive polarized ones and not using 120Hz LCD panels, as I’ve already seen some people mistakenly claiming they are 120Hz ones.

Zalman ZM-M215W Specifications

Display Size: 21.5 inch (55 cm)
Screen Ratio: 16:9 wide
Max Resolution: 1920×1080, Full HD
Response Time: 5ms
View Angle (2D): 170°(Horizontal) / 160°(Vertical)
View Angle (3D): 90°(Horizontal) / 10 ~ 12°(Vertical)
Video Ports: D-Sub, DVI
Power Consumption: ≤ 40W in Use, ≤ 1W in Standby
Dimensions: 531x382x200mm (W x H x D)
Weight: 4Kg

Zalman ZM-M240W Specifications

Display Size: 24 inch (60 cm)
Screen Ratio: 16:9 wide
Max Resolution: 1920×1080, Full HD
Response Time: 5ms
View Angle (2D): 170°(Horizontal) / 160°(Vertical)
View Angle (3D): 90°(Horizontal) / 10 ~ 12°(Vertical)
Video Ports: D-Sub, DVI
Power Consumption: ≤ 50W in Use, ≤ 1W in Standby
Dimensions: 572x415x190mm (W x H x D)
Weight: 8Kg

- For more information about all of Zalman Trimon 3D-capable monitors…