Stereoscopic Player 1.6.5 supports Tridelity multiview displays.

Stereoscopic Player is a versatile 3D movie player. It allows you to play stereo­scopic videos and DVDs (external decoder required) and also allows you to watch live video from a capture device. Since it is based on Direct­Show, it can handle almost any media format, for example AVI, MPEG, WMV, ASF and MOV. Videos can be coded in several different stereo­scopic formats. Please see the feature list for supported input and output formats.

More information at www.3dtv.at

3D PDF now also in stereo without glasses

The company more3d offers a software that allows DirectX based software show 3D without glasses.

The new moreStereo DX/GL 5.6 is the most versatile stereo generation software on the market. It gives customers the ability to show major 3D applications in vivid 3-D stereo. Seeing a virtual environment or product so real that you want to touch it is a key advantage for critical engineering reviews as well as for exciting customer presentations.

•     Shows major 3D applications in 3-D stereo
•     Ideal for Architecture, Planning, CAD/CAM VR or Simulation
•     Allows for simple engineering and customer 3D-presentations
•     Connects to all 3D displays from TRIDELITY.
•     Professional established platform: Windows XP 32/64-bit

From kitchen planning software on regular PC’s to CAD on professional 64 Bit Workstations – no matter what application you are using – moreStereo DX/GL will turn it into 3D stereo in an instant. Unlike “3D gaming drivers”, moreStereo DX/GL is targeted to professional users that require 3D stereo from within the application, full control of the 3D stereo effect and advanced features for virtual reality projections.

More information about the 3D driver here.

Postproduction from 3D films for autostereoscopic displays

Vienna, 28th March 2011 – the young Austrian company emotion3D achieved its first commercial success with the preparation of a new advertising spot for the BMW X3. emotion3D won a valuable contract with BMW thanks to its powerful software solution for post-processing 3D films. 

The 3D advertising clip will be shown in numerous showrooms worldwide, at selected locations in auto-stereoscopic 3D, i.e. without the need for the user to wear special 3D glasses. emotion3D converted the 3D cinema version of the advertisement to a 3D film format for “glasses-free” displays, enabling viewers to be drawn into a futuristic virtual world.

The 3D market has a future. Nearly all box office hits are now released in 3D. Due to the increasing demand for 3D films, the need for professional editing tools for 3D film material is growing correspondingly – a trend that emotion3D recognized in 2009 as a business opportunity.

This market demand motivated emotion3D to develop an innovative software solution for post-processing 3D film-material, which synthesizes camera perspectives at positions between the filmed cameras. This enables film sequences to be optimally customized to any kind of 3D display – not only traditional ones that require the user to wear glasses, but also the latest generation of “glasses-free” 3D displays.

http://www.emotion3d.tv

Checklist for creating stereo content

1.      Cross-talk
Stereoscopy is never perfect; there will be always some kind of leakage from one perspective view reaching the wrong eye. Make sure to limit the parallax before cross-talking gets too high.

2.      Motion
Make sure that things that have high parallax are not moving too fast. Especially if they have negative parallax.

3.      Interposition
This is one of the most common errors nowadays. Content creators tend to add objects to stereo scenes in post-production and they forget the objects that are in front of others should hide them. How often have I seen objects going through other objects and completely destroying a good 3d movie.

4.      Interference
Sometimes there might be structures that repeat themselves in a certain frequency, like the bars on a jail. A problem might occur if this frequency matches the parallax separation. This can lead to very disturbing images and increase the possibility of people getting headaches.

5.      Camera changes
Event changing the camera settings too often. You might already have noticed that movie trailers in 3D are usually more difficult to see than the movie itself. This is due to the frequent cut to scene with different focus and parallax values.

6.      Negative Parallax
Avoid using too much of negative parallax on longer movies. Viewers will find positive parallax (behind the screen) more comfortable.

7.      Contrast
Avoid high contrast on scenes with high parallax. One of the main problems here is due to the LCD technology. Neighbor pixel will tend to light up a bit causing ghosting which will destroy the parallax.

8.     A 3D Display is a window!
Treat the 3D display as a window. Things that should come out through the windows must fit completely inside it. If you try to move something out of the window and it touches the border, the object should stay where it is!

Virtual Reality Toolkit supports 3D without glasses

Vizard Virtual Reality Toolkit is everything you need to build interactive 3D content. Designed for rapid prototyping, Vizard gets you creating fast and provides the resources to deploy even the most challenging applications. With Vizard, even someone with no programming experience can leap into the world of interactive 3D content.
Vizard is a high level graphics toolkit for the development of high-performance graphics applications, including virtual reality, scientific visualization, games, and flight simulation. By providing you an object-oriented framework encompassing OpenGL, DirectX multimedia, human bipeds, display and peripheral hardware interfaces, and efficient networking, Vizard frees you from low-level programming and instead allows you to concentrate on creating your interaction and content. In addition, by building upon Vizard’s abstraction layer, your project is instantly upward compatible with future advances in all the underlying components.

Checkout the amazing videos here:
http://www.worldviz.com/products/vizard/videos.html

Autostereoscopic Display Principles - Part 2

The main technology behind all auto-stereoscopic displays that exist today is based on multiplexing pixels or sub-pixels. For example, everybody knows the old 3D videos in Anaglyph (red and green glasses). These videos can also be represented by a kind of multiplex schema. Before we start giving examples, let’s check how a LCD based Monitor works.

The liquid crystals used by LCDs are able to change their brightness depending on the electrical voltage applied to them. These crystals are equipped with a special transistor (TFT) which makes it possible to change the direction of the liquid and therefore changing the transparency of each liquid-crystal based pixel. The pixels on a LCD are arranged as a matrix, as shown in the following picture.

LCDs are based on a variant of the additive color model. This model basically uses red, green and blue light in order to produce the other colors. On LCDs however, the colors are not mixed. Due to the fact that the sub-pixels beeing so small, we can assume this model for the purpose of this document, therefore we will call this model from now on “RGB color model”.

The additive model is somehow awkward for most people who worked with inks already. When using inks, when you add green, blue and red you end up with some kind of gray, on the RGB model however, you will end up with white. Well, you may ask yourself, how you produce black. This is very simple, you simply turn off all color components.

Easy Virtual Reality Solution

Hi,

I've managed to get a video on the solution presented from TRIDELITY and TechViz at the Laval Virtual 2011 as i posted before.
Note that the movements of the Cube are tracking by a kind of camera system which is then used to move the object. I've tried it myseld and it works with many known applications like Google Sketchup, Google Earth, Autocad, Catia and many others. Really amazing.

Autostereoscopic Display Principles

In this article i will talk about stereoscopy and show in a very simple way, how most autostereoscopic 3D displays work nowadays.

 

What is Binocular Vision?

Usually the brain receives images from both eyes at the same time. These two images are slightly different from each other due to eye separation. The brain uses these small differences to combine these views into one and provide us with the notion of how far an object is (depth perception) and how fast the object is getting closer or away from us (movement perception).
In order to test how important binocular vision is to us, simply close one eye and at an arm length try bringing two pencil ends on top of each other. It is certainly more difficult than when both eyes are open. This happens because your skill in judging depth becomes poorer. By way of practice, these tasks may become easier and this is only possible since there are many other clues that help us when judging depth, the so called depth cues:

-    Size of objects (We know how big objects are).
-    Shadow
-    Interposition (the partial blocking of a more distant object by a nearer object)
-    Relative height (things near the horizon give the impression they are distant)
-    Perspective (parallel lines that recede into the distance appear to get closer together or converge)
-    Etc...

One thing that must be considered when creating stereo content is that not everybody has binocular vision. There are cases where it might be reduced or even completely lost, reasons include:

-    Reduced or lost vision on one eye
-    Loss of coordination of movement between both eyes
-    Issues with the brain comparing images from both eyes

Hence, when creating stereo content one has to make sure that binocular view alone is not enough for a perfect stereoscopic view, the other depth cues should also be used. 

3D Application Framework supports 3D without glasses

Frapper, the Filmakademie Application Framework, features a node-based scene model with plugins for node types, a model-view-controller architecture, a panel-oriented user interface similar to commercial 3D packages, and a viewport using the Ogre 3D render engine. Frapper enables developers to focus on the core functionality of their application and research by providing a foundation of basic functionality.

Frapper features:

• Support for Tridelity 3D monitors both Multi-Viewer and Single-Viewer.
• Node-based application framework focused on 3D animation
• Real-time capabilities designed for interactive and offline rendering
• Based on Qt and Ogre3D
• Platform independent
• Open source, released under LGPL 2.1
• Assets released under the creative commons license
• Almost any functionality can be added through plugin architecture
• Node plugins add functionality in a modular way
• Customizable panel and widget plugins
• Extensible compositing and shading framework
• Variety of exisitng nodes (Facial Animation, NPR, SSAO...)
• Pipeline cooperates with common DCC tools through Ogre Exporters

Among other examples, I think the Agent Framework is one worth mentioning.

Using AVISynth to get a tiled Multi-Viewer 3D video - Part 2

3D Video Wall

Hi,

if you were following the blog, on Part 1 of this series you were able to make your first side-by-side stereo video using AVISynth and VirtualDub.

If you had no material in order to test, be patient, i will be posting a ip file with an example including the avs file and a set of picture sequences in the next post. I will also post some nice scripts for converting existing 5-tiled videos into Youtube 3D videos and how to convert 8-tiled videos into 5-tiled videos.

On this post we will concentrate in getting all 5 views on one video in the so called 5-tiled video.

Using AVISynth to get a tiled Multi-Viewer 3D video - Part 1

Many people ask me if they need to buy special software in order to create 3D videos for glasses-free displays. Well, the first thing you need is some kind of 3D application: 3DS Max and Cinema 4D are not for free I know, still you could do something using blender for example.

As far as i know, there is no plug-in for this tool until now, but it should not be difficult to write one.
On this post however, I will be showing how to get the videos together. It means, you have already rendered your views using blender or other software.

If you ask yourself which resolution should I use? Well Tridelity has created a very useful document on Multi-Viewer 3D resolutions which answers this question.
For this example, you will need:

• VirtualDub
• AVISynth
• A video codec, I recommend ffdshow or xvid
• 5 picture sequences or 5 videos (each video is one perspective)

Glasses-free 3d virtual reality made easy

Tridelity's TT Driver

Tridelity AG and Techviz will be presenting a very intuitive virtual reality system which enables users manipulate 3d objects using a simple 20cm cube at the Laval Virtual this year.
The system is based on a tracking system placed on top of the auto-stereoscopic display which tracks special markers placed on the box. The tracking communicates with the 3D application and rotates the object accordignly.
The great thing about it is not only that it's easy to use, but that it's compatible with most OpenGL based applications.