We have an Epson Home Cinema 5030UB which is compatible with HDMI 1.4 (generally, BluRay) 3D formats – I think it uses the polarized glasses, as I understand it the active-shutter glasses are for DLP projectors (this one uses 3 LCD panels). However the glasses do say “RF 3D” on the box so maybe they’re DLP-style (which apparently involves a sync signal from the projector).
Anyway, I’m curious if anyone knows whether Unity can generate images compatible with these types of glasses.
Went to see Dr. Strange in IMAX 3D tonight and got to thinking we could have some fun with our 150" screen at home.
I don’t think Unity can do it out of the box. But the setup wouldn’t be hard. It should basically be the standard two camera set up from VR. One camera renders to each eye. The technical part will be convincing the output from cameras in Unity to go to the appropriate channels for the TV.
Random googling results:
It looks like there are several assets on the store that might do it. This one looks promising. But there are cheaper ones that might also work.
You may also be able to just use Unity’s VR features directly.
Yeah that was my conclusion, too. It would be fun to play around with, but nothing I’m going to spend money on or sink a lot of time into. (We haven’t actually used the 3D feature yet and we’ve had this projector for 3 years – honestly I don’t even know if it works, since we push our video throughout the house over a dedicated multicast IP network.)
I was hoping there was an option or a script or something that I’d overlooked… the usual “Make This Work For Me” checkbox.
You can get some Nvidia drivers which takes any DirectX/OpenGL graphics and turn it into 3D content for various displays like a 3D TV. So don’t see why that shouldn’t work for Unity games too. I haven’t tried it lately though.
Yeah they don’t list my projector specifically, but I do wonder if it would work anyway. They list six HDMI-compatible 3D displays. Not sure why it would be display-specific, that’s kind of the point of having a standard. They only list older cards though. The wife’s machine has a new Titan. Ah, looks like they last updated it in 2009 for Win7. Not encouraging.
The Requirements page says it uses the manufacturer’s glasses but the troubleshooting FAQ only references IR-style active-shutter glasses but I’ll probably try it eventually anyway. The trick is getting video from her machine (upstairs loft office) to the projector (living room ceiling) – fortunately there is a pretty direct path if I buy a very long HDMI cable.
Originally I was wondering if I could push the 3D content through an XboxOne, actually, since we have one in the AV closet hooked up to all the other gear that already drives the living room equipment. I searched around and 3D-capable Xbox360 titles that MS has deemed XBone-compatible do still correctly render 3D output when activated, but for some reason it appears nobody is doing that in dedicated XboxOne titles.
It sounds like it may work differently now, but I remember in the 360 era if you switched a game to 3D mode on a non-3D TV, it looked like it just rendered the top half of the screen for one eye and the bottom half for the other eye. So I was sort of hoping it would be that easy…
