[sldev] University of Michigan Stereoscopic Viewer patch

[Dale Mahalko]

I bought shutter glasses off ebay a few years ago for very cheap.

However, a major problem with shutter glasses is that it effectively
cuts your monitor's refresh rate in half, and you will need a very
high grade monitor and video card to properly support shutter glasses.
A monitor set to 60 Hz refresh will have an effective refresh of only
30 Hz with the glasses.

The barest minimum of acceptable performance requires a monitor
refresh rate of 120 Hz, giving 60 Hz with the glasses. But though 60
Hz is a global base refresh standard, it still not fast enough and can
be headache-inducing. Flicker at 60Hz is often most noticeable in the
periphery of vision, such as when a monitor is off to the side out of
the direct line of sight.

I personally require at least 85 Hz for most CRT monitor images to be
rock-solid without flicker, which pushes the shutter-glasses
requirement up to 170 Hz. You will be hard-pressed to find any
monitors that support 170 Hz, and especially at high resolutions. The
market is also lonely when you look for video cards with this sort of
capability.

Also, most of the ultra-high refresh rates are only available for
lower screen resolutions. While you might find a video card capable of
a tolerable 150 Hz at 640x480, the max may drop to an unacceptable 90
Hz at 1280x1024.


Apparantly 3-chip DLP projectors are well-suited for shutter glasses
since the micromirror arrays can move at very high speeds, permitting
very easy projection of shutter-glass displays.

The main problem for this is sharing the sync data amongst many
wired-glasses viewers, but it can be done with new wireless shutter
technology where all viewers pick up shutter sync from an infrared
emitter under the projection screen.


This topic would benefit from a list on the wiki of monitors,
projectors, and video cards capable of refresh rates 120 Hz and
higher, as well as a list of the max supported refresh rates at
various resolutions.

- Scalar Tardis / Dale Mahalko


On 11/12/07, Rob Lanphier <robla at lindenlab.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> For alert JIRA watchers, this is old news, but many of you might have
> missed this:
> http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2972
>