3D without the glasses

What is this crazy ‘third dimension’ you speak of? Well, we’re glad you asked...

You were at Atomic Live last year, right? You remember that 3D monitor that you could look at without wearing glasses? Great! Because the engineers behind it have released their third version, which is more usable and less, well, ‘engineering sample-ey’ than the first version you saw at Atomic Live.

The dot pitch is smaller, so you can read text easier, and they now work with ATI cards as well as with NVIDIA cards. But more importantly than all this, we came to grips with how it works – and even though we’re still doing a bit of a back and forth with the engineers, this is what we understand so far.

In its simplest form, it displays a complex image made up of multiple ‘cameras’ in a scene (rather than the usual single viewpoint we all use now). When you look at the screen, a series of slits that are mounted in front of the monitor obstruct your eyes’ direct viewing path to the pixels, so you can’t focus on a single image like you’re doing now.

The result is that your eyes don’t focus on the screen per se; they focus on the slits in the screen (known as a parallax barrier) which decouples your eyes’ natural common viewpoint and forces them to observe independent images produced by different cameras.

It’s a technological bait-and-switch that exploits our traditional lines of sight, and it works by obscuring what we’re used to looking at and providing each eye with a different image to look at in the background which effectively overlap and fool the brain into seeing a stereoscopic image.

This is why its viewing angles are a little strange. As you move around, you’ll see a 3D effect, then the image will suddenly break up -- and then recombine quickly.

The 3D monitor needs to be coupled with special software that replaces the single camera viewpoint in most games and animations with an arc of eight cameras. This means that you need eight times the processing grunt to get games running at the same framerate in 3D as you would in 2D.

On the content creation side, there are plugins available for 3D tools like 3Ds Max and Maya so you can generate 3D scenes for the monitor. Creating video out in the real world is a bit harder, because from what I understand, you need to shoot with eight cameras (my video geek instincts tell me that they’d need to be genlocked -- a process that jams the clocks of the cameras together so they capture an image at the same time).

It's spiffy and cool, and if you want to see one in action, there are a few computers set up with 3D monitors at Beyond Gaming and Internet that run World of Warcraft, Call of Duty 2, Unreal Tournament, CS:S and Need for Speed Underground 2. It’s underneath the George Street Cinemas in Sydney. I don’t want to sound like I’m promoting the place -- but in all honestly -- the chairs are more comfortable than City Hunter.