Anybody ever use the 3d stereo effects in SW2006?

[solidmecman]

I was reading an article about 3d stereo technology with shutter glasses and it looks pretty cool, but I wonder how good it actually works, anybody experience this?

 

[solidmecman]

well I guess not, just thought this sounded interesting when I read about it and being alot of these nVidia Quadro cards support stereo I thought more people might be using it. Where do you get the plugin for SW2006 for stereo?

Thanks

 

[phreaq]

I've been curious about those glasses myself, but haven't seen them myself

I'm leaning towards the "novelty" side of things, and perhaps even a cool way to get a wicked headache

phreaq
Has anyone seen my brain today? (^_^)

http://www.phreaq.net

 

[solidmecman]

lol, they sure do look cool, I wonder how it makes your models look... probably is very expensive anyhow

 

[dunkysmith]

Hi, most modern NVidea cards will support 3d shutter glasses with the driver from the NVidea site. Most common are the Elsa 3E Revelators. Was gonna get some a while back, but they don't work with an LCD/TFT monitor because of the low refreash rates. Not sure how it work with Solidworks. I've heard you can only wear them for about an hour without getting a headache though...

- Dunc

 

[dunkysmith]

PS. Just had a cheeky peeky on ebay and you can get a pair or revelators buy-it-now for £23 if you are still interested...

 

[solidmecman]

I think the 'Crystal Eyes" shutter glasses from StereoGraphics are supposed to be the best ones going..

 

[CycloneWade]

I used to work for a company that was in the 3d Stereo imagery business. They build and design large scale visualization systems for oil and gas, automotive amoung other industries. They design their stuctural support systems within Solidworks, then they show the client their system (within solidworks) using this 3d plugin. Makes for a real nice presentation on the technology.
Learn more about their technology here...

http://www.fakespace.com

Two leaders in stereo shutter technology are Stereographics and NuVision.
Stereographics is the leader in shutter technology, nuvision makes an acceptable knockoff.

 

[solidmecman]

what type of monitors and video cards did they use? what pair of shutter glasses?

and did the models really pop out of the screen when viewing with the shutter glasses?

I heard you need a CRT monitor with at least a 120hz refresh rate because the shutter glasses will half that so you are really only seeing 60hz refresh rate..

 

[CycloneWade]

*Most* CRT monitors can not handle the high refresh rate, the refresh rates need to be at 96hz to have an acceptable stereo image. We did 99% of stereo image with large DLP or CRT projectors, manufactured by Christie Digital and or BARCO. You can build lower priced systems using what is called passive stereo using any of the NVIDIA quadro series video cards. Passive stereo utilizes one projector polarized for each eye aligned on top of one another. The video card would then send the right eye and left eye signal through each channel of the video card. At the time, SGI(Serious $) was the big computing power behind stereo imagery, but now high end video cards with DVI output are getting some serious play in the industry when one or more workstations are clustered together. Our mainstay pc video card was from NVIDIA in the Quadro series put into a BOXX workstation(Built specically for clustering). It is unbelievable until you really "see" what this imagery looks like. If the display is designed properly, you would feel like your graphics are floating in space and your in the middle of it. Today, Los Almos National Labs has the highest resolution system ever built sitting at 43million pixels. Thats 33 tiled stereoscopic projectors running 1280 x 1024. Yeah, you guessed it, they build a better bomb.

 

[solidmecman]

so the Geforce Quadro cards are using passive technology when you have the shutter glasses plugged into the video card?

how is active better and different?

 

[CycloneWade]

When you plug the stereoglasses into the video card, its using the active stereo technology. Active stereo technology is consider the best type of stereoscopic display. Active stereo is when one projector or monitor is drawing both eye images. What happens is the projector is drawing the left eye and your shutter glasses are blocking the right eye, then the projector is drawing right eye and the shutters block the left eye. It does this cycle 48 times a second @ 96hz (48hz/eye). There are some optical quality (brightness and contrast) issues with passive stereo, however passive stereo technology is *much* cheaper.

 

[solidmecman]

well I have a nVidia Quadro FX 1000 video card that has a 3-pin Stereo 3d port on the card. The card also has 2 DVI ports on it. I have my 21" Dell LCD monitor connected to 1 of the DVI ports of the card. The max refresh rate I can get on this monitor is 75hz, but the Quadro video card can put out up to 120hz I believe. So if I were to plug a pair of CrystalEyes shutter glasses (the best ones out there right?) into the stereo port of the Quadro video card, would this work very well? or would it not look right because my lcd monitor can only do 75hz? But I would be using ACTIVE stereo right?

do you think using shutter glasses in the above setup like I have would result in a better 3d image than you get at those iMax 3d thearters? I remmber once seeing the movie "The Birds" in one of those thearters in Disney Land and it was incredible, looked like the birds were actually flying around you. But I only had to wear those cheap flimsy glasses..

 

[CycloneWade]

LCD technology of any type will not support active stereo, has to do with lcd technology, not solidworks. It does feel like the models are floating in space. Of course the bigger the display the better the immersive feel. The cheap glasses where polarized, not all polarized glasses are cheap though. IMAX is impressive because of the size of the display. Most likely if you found a CRT monitor that could support the resolution it would be cool, but not as impressive as IMAX because it's small size.

 

[solidmecman]

but you are saying that the lcd shutter glasses will give a better 3d image (higher resolution, jumps out at you more, etc), then what you see at the imax threaters using the polarized glasses?

by the way, if you enable the 3d Stereo plugin for Solidworks, would it make the screen look all blurry? so the only way to see the screen the right way is through 3d shutter glasses?

 

[CycloneWade]

I'm a big fan of active stereo vrs passive, however this depends mostly on the amount of money one is willing to fork over for high quality equipment. Its very hard to say that a little 21 monitor will be better then the IMAX, considering the folks at IMAX spend millions of dollars on display equipment and post production for their movies.

You won't see a blurry screen. If you have the proper equipment that can display a active stereo image, then you will see two images slighty seperate from each other. For this too look like a 3d sterescopic image then you must have the eyewear to turn off/on each eye.

 

[zemlin]

I have an old pair of Revalator glasses. Haven't used them for a long time. They are great for 3D games. Was never able to make them work in windowed application, only full screen stuff. Tried lots of things to get them working in Pro/E but was not successful.

Maybe things have changed since then.

 

[solidmecman]

give them a shot in Solidworks and let us know how they work... I think you can get the free plug-in for solidworks 3d stereo off the solidworks website