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DTI Stereoscopic LCD Virtual Window Review 43

Posted by Hemos from the fun-with-toys dept.
Octavian Busuioc wrote to us regarding a review of the DTI Stereoscopic LCD Virtual Window. Now there's a mouthful - but it's also a very nice LCD screen with that has full stereoscopic effect without shutter glasses. Good background information as well.
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DTI Stereoscopic LCD Virtual Window Review More

DTI Stereoscopic LCD Virtual Window Review

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  • Take a look at this link [cnn.com]. It's about a remote surgery being performed by doctor using a robot and a camera. I know if I was going under the knife, I'd really want my doctor to have one of these. Think of the alternatives- No 3d, or glasses that give you a migraine after wearing them for a couple of hours.
  • You are not the market they are pushing for. the monitor does what it does better than anything else out there, the gov't and the medical industry won't even blink at the price tag.
  • Guess that's what the preview button is for :)

  • "due to the fact that no game out there is actually tweaked to work properly with stereoscopic images, ghosting is still predominant in many cases. Most of these cases happen when light and dark graphics are combined. ... Outdoor levels looked really good and worked fantastically on the display, while dark indoor levels produced major levels of ghosting. But yet again, this can, and will be fixed as soon as developers start adapting games for stereoscopic viewing."


    I'm not sure that this is as self obvious as the reviewer thinks. From my experience with LCD shutter glasses (Revelator on Elsa - the ones mentioned in the article) it has little to do with the game but everything to do with the hardware. From my perception ghosting was caused by the closed shutter not being dark enough and the bright sections of the screen showing through. How it is still present when the shutter is a lens and not an opaque lcd crystal I'm not sure. An explanation of how it is manifested on the unit I'm curious to know. And how software developers are supposed to influence would also be an interesting explanation. Currently the system draws the scenes based on Direct3d or OpenGL scene data (even in windowed mode so you can see 3d images on web pages - .jps - jpeg stereo). The only influence I can see is for games to not have high contrast graphics. By example though Need for Speed 3 suffers. The white line down the center of the road ghosts even on the light coloured roads.

    The only solution I can see is one of improved hardware. The results are impressive even with LCD shutter glasses. This monitor is one I am now lusting over. If I had the $ in the bank I'd go and buy one today. If you are lucky enough to be rich enough to be an early adopter please do because I want to be in the second wave.
    .oO0Oo.

  • stay away fromthe goggle but you're dead wrong if you think that's the be all and end all of home 3d.

    try the 3D Revelator [elsa.com] mentioned in the article. Same effect from $40 wireless glasses - a bit bigger than a pair of shades and comfortable over glasses (mine anyway).

    you need a 120hz vertical refresh monitor too


    .oO0Oo.
  • <SARCASM>Yeah... I'm sure they wouldn't give all the other 3D displays out there as 'nice' reviews.</SARCASM>
  • in fps game aiming can be tricky

    the sprites for the aimer are drawn in 2d over the screen and have no depth

    laser sites are needed with q3 has for some weapons.

    It takes some getting used to but when you turn the sights off it adds 'realism' *cough* to the game. Shame your opponents can line up pixel perfect so it give you a disadvantage against 2d opponents.

    It makes the games more fun though. Often I'll just stand and watch 'cos it looks so cool and exploring the maps is great too. And jumping off high buildings and falling to the floor gives you a bit of a falling rush. Great fun.

    .oO0Oo.
  • By 'stereoscopic goggles' I presum you're talking about 'image in goggles' type VR systems

    It sounds like you may have suffered from "VR sickness". It can also come from the delay betwen moving your head, and the having the image change. It's rather like sea-sickness. Your inner ear/kinesthetic system says you've moved thisesy, your eyes say you've moved that way and your stomach splits the difference, using your lunch as ballast.

    I know of one person who did some masters research on the issue many years ago.

  • yeah, i cant wait to be playing q3 and have a fly buzz up and land on the screen, "damn, i cant hit that stupid thing with a rocket for the life of me, maybe i should try my rail gunn"
  • Dunno, with proper movement ratios (so that the robotics move at a fraction of the surgeon's distance & speed), a surgeon COULD be a helluva lot more precise through a remote interface than any human could possibly be.

    Of course, this is given that the robotics are moving as smoothly as the surgeon's movements (and not those damn jerking movements that seem to be the given in cheap robots on the market...)
  • I don't think they're exactly dead, but they're not exactly being heavily marketed. They've certainly gone down in price - I got some cheap LCD shutter-type glasses for about $50 (ELSA Revelator), and the common video cards can now drive the monitors fast enough to avoid flicker severe enough to cause headaches.

    The most important development I've seen is that the latest drivers for the shutter glasses allow any game using the Direct3D interface in Windows to generate the proper stereoscopic perspectives. Since most popular, recent Windows 3D games are doing this, that means there's suddenly a large number of 3D images to look at (can you say Lara Croft in true color 3D - I knew you could... :)

    Unfortunately, and as usual, there hasn't been the same development for alternative OSes (after all, where's the money? :)

    The main problems I saw with the LCD shutter glasses were two:

    1. ghosting

    Mainly because the LCDs don't completely block out the images for one eye from the other, so you can get a little double vision. It's not too bad though.

    2. nausea

    I get this in first person shooters & racing games, because the viewpoint is changing quickly & violently w/o my head moving. When I get "into" the image enough, my stomach starts heaving :(

    The best way I've found to use the shutter glasses are for 3D demos where the viewpoint doesn't change, but the displayed objects move around. Feels like your monitor is a window and you're looking into some other universe (esp. if you've got some cool music to go along with the entertainment).
  • I work in a vision research lab where we have a 240Hz refresh monochrome monitor, and can thus do stereoscopic displays using ferro-electric shutter glasses that can quickly switch at 120Hz. The monitor has a special high speed decay phospher, so that each eye image is isolated. It is quite impressive and gives very crisp stereo images. I don't know about your setup, but my guess is that the "ghosting" you see is a result of slow phospher decay and not LCD leakage. That's just speculation, however.

    A system without the glasses has many advantages for us (the glasses are generally too bulky and delicate for use outside the lab environment), and we are definitely excited about his technology.

  • At that price I'd buy ... (Score:3)

    by milkman1 ( 139222 ) on Sunday July 23, 2000 @02:34PM (#911614)
    2 1024x768 Projection displays.
    Add polarizers to both of them and behold a wallsized stereooptic display.

    Behold the benifits of a nonshuttered 3d display which alows a good range of head motion (just no tilting)
  • Well, despite what that other guy is saying, it's not a trailing slash that's screwing up the link (duh), it's the fact that the correct URL is NEW.3dhardware.net, instead of WWW.3dhardware.net.

    This makes me wonder if the folks at 3dhardware didn't set up a secondary server after being alerted to the fact that their main one might be slashdotted. Maybe someone forgot to tell Slashdot about it.
  • If I was going under the knife, the last thing I would want is REMOTE surgery!!!

  • Nice idea, but it's freaking $11,000!

    That's for the 18" version. The 15" is a mere $8,600. They did tell the reviewer that mass production will bring the price down to affordable ranges (although one person's 'affordable' might be another's Oh my God!'). Quite a glowing review. I'll be interested to see what some of the more mainstream publications like PC Magazine or Maximum PC think of it.
  • At $11k/unit you can bet your butt that they're not going into home units. They're meant for people who spend hours a day in front of a visualization workstation. This could be things like Molecular modelling for Drug design, General medical imaging ("let's get a 3-D view of that tumor near your optic nerve"), geological modelling, process simulations, etc., etc., etc..

    When you've paid $180K for the workstation/compute engine, $11K for a 3-D display that you can actually use for a long period of time is a decent investment.

  • Re:These things are dangerous (Score:3)

    by kugano ( 84704 ) on Sunday July 23, 2000 @02:56PM (#911620) Homepage
    IANAD, but I wouldn't be so quick to blame those effects on stereoscopic imagery in general. I work for a research group [uiuc.edu] at the University of Illinois that does some work with the Cave at the NCSA. The Cave is a virtual reality system that uses stereoscopic imaging on four projection screens that surround the user to create a VR effect. I've never heard of this problem from anyone that's used the system (although some people do get slightly nauseous or feel other side effects after prolonged usage).

    I would imagine the side effects you mentioned are HIGHLY dependent on the specific hardware and on the person (just like pretty much anything VR-related).
  • Hrm, wouldn't the light lose its polarization when it hit the wall?

    We don't know how bad things are in north korea, but here are some pictures of hungry children. -- CNN

  • There is a common unpleasant experience that can be brought about by looking at a stereoscopic image because of the difference between where the two eyes converge and what a single focuses on.

    For example, in real life, when we focus on an object, our eyes do two things:

    1. they converge on the object so that it is in the center of the view of the eye and
    2. Each eye focuses the image so that the object is clearly in focus.
    In real life, for each distance something can be away from our eyes, there are a convergence/focus pair. When something is 5 feet from us, our brain knows how much to converge and how much to focus.

    When you put on stereo glasses all of a sudden that all changes. You are converging on something 5 feet from you because in the stereo field the offset of the two images is suggesting 5 feet, but your eyes are focusing on a screen that is 1 foot away from you. All those focus/convergence pairs the brain is used to can no longer be used.

    Now, the brain has to move the convergence of the eyes while keeping the focus of the eyes static and it is not used to that.

    This is a common reason for uncomfortable feelings when viewing stereo images. For people who have done it a lot, their brain is used to it. Yours can get used to it to if you look enough.

  • No... This technology is widely used for 3D movies and slide shows.
    The Science Museum of MN has a 3D show that combines Slides and laser light. They just have two slide projectors covered with polarizers. The lasers a naturally polarized. The effect is very cool if somewhat cheezy.

    Note:
    If you were going to do this with video projectors, You would need to use either DLP projectors, or LCD projectors with natural polarization seperated by 90 degrees. (LCDs are polarized by their very design.

  • Re:These things are dangerous (Score:4)

    by KFury ( 19522 ) on Sunday July 23, 2000 @05:05PM (#911624) Homepage
    Let me warn you right now: stereoscopic vision is not the future.

    Uh, oh. I guess I'd better pluck one of my eyes out then! We (most of us, anyhow) do have two eyes, and used in conjunction, that is stereoscopic vision.

    As for making it work well, any raver can tell you that, done correctly, stereophonic sound can actually disorient and make you dizzy, and we only get 10% of our sensory information from our ears. Naturally, goggles simply have to be made better.

    There's a huge difference between stereo goggles and a stereoscopic display. The goggles have to make sure that the horizon and field of vision changes in realtime with the movement of your head. A 3D monitor or movie takes care of that automatically: You tilt your head, the image tilts. Not so with goggles, where you 'take the image with you.'

    So while with current technology goggles may be disorienting, it's only a matter of time before the precision is there to 'fool' the senses into playing along. As for non-immersive displays, well, there's no problem.

    Kevin Fox
  • You are confused. The virtual boy failed because it wasn't as fun to use as the game boy. That, and it can make one feel sick (in a variety of ways!).

    IIRC, Pokemon was not released for the virtual boy, but recently there was a TV show which caused siezures in a significant number of children in Japan.

    Lastly, only percentage of the population will get sick using goggles. Don't think that because you had a very bad experience that everyone else will too.

    -Adam

    Posted using last night's Mozilla build! Go Mozilla! [mozilla.org]
  • That makes 12 hours in 2 days that I've been staring at a stereoscopic display. No, these things are not "dangerous". Hey, some people get seizures when their TV flickers. Anyway, I think to so quickly dismiss the fact that most humans are born with stereo vision and that it is a large part of our sensory input is silly. But then maybe I'm biased. I've been doing this kind of stuff since I was a kid (drawing stereograms by hand, etc), and my eye muscles do pretty much whatever I want them to. (Ever see anyone dilate their pupils on command? I can. :) Ah well. I'll take your 3D TV when you get it.. ;)
  • .."These airplane things will never catch on. Those silly Wright Brothers. Look at them. 12 seconds in the air.. Now who would want that?"

    Yeah well, bad analogy. ;) My point is.. it is not the concept that is dead. It's the people's minds who are making these things, because I've been dying for some for years but there aren't any on the market that I would buy. Oh well... (yeah I need sleep, canya tell?)

  • What kind of goggles were they? This is important. It's not the stereoscopy itself that caused you to black out. If this were true you wouldn't be able to walk down the street with both eyes open.
    Were they shutter glasses? (Sometimes called flicker glasses.) Shutter glasses are known to cause problems in some people.
  • Sounds cool, but your link is broken :(
  • http://new.3dhardware.net/reviews/dti18/
  • Something in the slashcode is broken... i used (/a) [with the pointy things instead of parentheses (sp?)] bt it insered a space between the / and the a.

    Mark Duell

  • It's 11,000 freaking dollars! (Score:3)

    by Chairboy ( 88841 ) on Sunday July 23, 2000 @02:22PM (#911632) Homepage
    Nice idea, but it's freaking $11,000! For that money, I'd buy myself a pair of Apple Cinema displays and a pair of good ol' shutter glasses for 3d.

    Why two cinema displays?

    Easy, one for my office, and one to sleep with, silly.

    FYI, you can get the same effect as this 3d LCD display for a lot less. Simply purchase some crack-cocaine and take that while playing Quake. It'll also make the carnage much... meatier, I imagine.
  • I wonder if this "review" is another, "hey man, write a good review and I'll hook you up with one of these..." The review makes it sound just too good.

  • The correct URL is . For some reason it requires the / at the end. [3dhardware.net]

    Mark Duell
  • Should be http://new.3dhardware.net/reviews/dti18/ (no link cause the slashcode is killing my HTML [see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/07/23/16724 1&cid=6])

    Mark Duell

  • These things are dangerous (Score:3)

    by vertical-limit ( 207715 ) on Sunday July 23, 2000 @02:26PM (#911636)
    3-D steroscopic vision sounds cool and all, but, unfortunately, it's still way too early to be used properly -- right now, the technology just doesn't suit home uses.

    I had the misfortunate of trying on stereoscopic goggles once during a tour of a university computer lab I took back while I was in high school. As soon as I put them on, I became dizzy and nauseous, and my heart rate and blood pressure increased. The tour guide assured me it was just a passing sensation. What I think he really meant was a "passing out" sensation; I blacked out briefly and had to go to the hospital. Let me tell you, I'm never trying on stereoscopic goggles again.

    Later, I looked into the causes of this, and the technicians told me it was due to the 3-D image not being "enveloping" enough; that is, the brain realizes that the vision isn't "real", but can't pick out the "real" part. So unless we're capable of creating completely realistic 3-D images -- and we aren't (yet) -- stereoscopic goggles can be dangerous to large sections of the population. Remember Nintendo's ill-fated Virtual Boy system? A lot of people went into seizures while playing a Pokémon game on it in Japan.

    Let me warn you right now: stereoscopic vision is not the future. Stay far away from those damn goggles.

  • The correct URL is [snip]

    Does anybody else wonder how a bad link gets into a SlashDot article? Wouldn't the reviewer(s) have to try the link to determine whether the submission is worth putting up?
  • ack... that should read:

    The correct URL is http://new.3dhardware.net/reviews/dti18/For some reason it requires the / at the end. [3dhardware.net]

    I guess I should use preview.

    Mark Duell
  • My bad, I meant Four.
  • Ok, that's fine. If you win one of these things, or are given one as a gift, just send it along to me and I'll take care of it. Thanks.
  • If the manufacturers would double the number of pixels in the vertical direction, then going into 3D mode wouldn't make much difference.

    I can see that in just a few years none of us are going to have a CRT in our houses. LCD is the future. I like the way that my laptop screen is totally flicker free in any lighting. Add in a 3D view mode and I wouldn't want to use my video tube monitor anymore.

    Kind of a shame when an era ends though. Once TV's and computer monitors all switch to LCD that will be the end of the vacume tube. It always made me laught to see the labels on TV's in the mid eighties that claimed the TV was 100% solid state, with the business end of the largest vacume tubes ever built siting out in plain view.
  • I have one of those (Virtual Boy) and have never had any problems with it. (In fact the Pinball game is amazing). They where selling them off at a KB Toy store $25 + 3 games.
  • Is it jsut me, or are 3D/steroscopic glasses a dead concept?

    I remember back in the mid-90s that on every PCGamer there was an Ad for these things, but I never recall very much software that supported them and they were always overpriced. I don't know anyone who has them and I've never really seen them in stores.

    And now with an $11,000 price tag, I doubt they're going to make very many sales. It's really sad when a company makes a great product that can't sell based on the price...
  • >As soon as I put them on, I became dizzy and nauseous, and my heart rate and blood pressure increased.

    Sounds to me like they worked exactly as planned! Programmers sweat for years to draw those exact responsed out of thick skinned gamers. Sometimes I feel that way opening MS Word 2000 - all those buttons staring at me - yikes!

    >I blacked out briefly and had to go to the hospital.

    Were you pregnant or do you have heart problems?

    Perhaps it was the content and not the device. What did you see? Double D cups??

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