Get out those old 3D glasses from your comic book collection. Here are some pcitures I made with an unofficial stereoscopic viewer for Second Life. (You’ll need red/blue or red/cyan glasses. Red/green won’t work.) You might wanna save these to your harddisk and watch them in full screen mode:
Walking through Second Life and seeing all the Kids5B builds in real 3D was incredibly rewarding for me yesterday. If you like the effect in the pictures here, imagine an even better experience if you use new 3D technology. Did you see the movie “Beowolf” in 3D? Or the “U2 3D” film? Or maybe you went to an IMAX sometime, or you saw one of those 3D movies at Disneyland.Then you know what I’m talking about: Things popping out of the screen right in front of your nose. 3D technology these days is far better than the oldschool red/blue or red/green stuff. IMAX, RealD or Disneyland use prism glasses instead. And not many people know that the same technology is available for your home, too. For your TV, console and computer.
I tried this and it worked. All you need is an Nvidia graphics card (7800 or better), a special Nvidia driver, a certain interface and a pair of so called shutter glasses – and you get perfect 3D on your TV or monitor. It even works with most DLP video projectors – thats the way I do it at home. Up until now this worked with movies and many games, but NOT with Second Life. Now it does!
Yesterday I found an experimental SL viewer, developed by some guys at Michigan University and a guy called Dale Glass. His viewer supports both the oldschool red/blue 3D mode, and the new shutter glass technology which gives a result similiar to a good IMAX or RealD movie.
While the red/blue mode has the advantage of just needing your old pair of red/blue 3D glasses (they cost about one Dollar or Euro), the shutterglasses mode is the real deal! SL in IMAX or RealD quality, avatars popping out in front of you face, and streets far behind the monitor. Oh yeah! Linden Lab already announced that they will build in a stereoscopic 3D mode into the official viewer, too.
Here are some usefil links for building your personal holodeck at home:
You can download Dale’s experimental 3D viewer here. Read the FAQ, there is one DLL file you need to copy from the regular viewer to the experimental one.
Here is a list of 3D compatible projectors.
Some 3D Projector FAQs.
This shop has shutter glasses for consoles and PCs, and also 3D Head Mounted Displays: iGlasses (US) or iGlasses (EU) Resolution of the Head Mounted Displays is too low for SL, so thats not really cool yet. But my guess is, in a few years we’re gonna use those, too 🙂