Elected as first advisory board member of MTBS3D!

News & General Discussion
1

They’ve just put a press release out about this. It’s pretty exciting. Basically MTBS (Meant to be Seen) is a non-proprietary advocacy group for stereoscopic 3D gaming. As an independent game developer, I’ll be helping to spread the word and writing up documentation on how to get your games S-3D (stereoscopic 3D) ready!

I’ve already been testing some of the little Unity games available in the PC format, and they look great! I’ll also be working with stereoscopic technology providers, looking for Mac solutions and things like that.

One of the press releases is available here:

2

Cool and congrats! But how does it work? Don’t you have to alter the game?

-Jon

3

It’s pretty straight forward actually. If you have the 3D drivers, the software extracts the actual 3D data from your game. So if your game is a true 3D experience it mostly works out of the box, though sometimes a little tweaking is necessary, but only on the consumer side. I’ve tested the fullscreen Unity stuff already and it looks great!

There are different ways to get stereoscopic 3D. The main approach used to be shutter glasses which would work with CRT-based monitors. Each eye would alternate quickly to create the 3D illusion, so it looked kind of stroby.

The coolest new invention is the iZ3D monitor. It’s a nice regular LCD but it actually has two layers of LCD monitor! You wear polarized glasses (like in those motion rides) and all 3D games start to have depth and/or come out of the screen. You can of course check out more information at mtbs3d.com, but it’s a pretty cool technology that hopefully will really take off.

4

Sounds interesting, is there a site to learn more?

Huh? How does it do that?

5

Well the advocacy group site is http://www.mtbs3d.com and of course there are plenty of other sites with info out there. The url for the monitor is http://www.iz3d.com

As far as “extracting” the 3D data, it’s done with an S3D nVidia driver, since the game is 3D the depth info is available to the 3D driver.

6

Good stuff Dave, keep us posted about any new and interesting developments (I’ll do my best to actively watch for those but still… :P)

7

I know this was an old thread, but I now have one of these iZ3D monitors, and I’m trying to get Unity to work with it. Is it (should it be) as simple as firing up your game and hitting Shift Num *? Or do we have to do anything special in the game itself? (that advocacy site has changed too much for me to find anything about Unity + iZ3d there)

8

Yikes, that’s one old forum message! Yes, it’s very easy, just treat it like an off-the-shelf game, it works great!

9

Ok. I backed my driver back to version 1.0 and I can now see it when I hit Num*. I have these ‘ghost’ images though, playing with the Num+/- help some. Any tips?

10

Have you tried it with a number of off-the-shelf games? Do they look okay?

I’d try messing with your camera settings in Unity, find a balance of depth/FOV, etc