Head Mounted Displays

Does anyone use a head mounted display, or 3d shutter glasses for viewing SL in full stereo 3d?

I'm particularly interested in knowing whether these display glasses would work with SL:
eMagin Z800 3D Visor

More info at:
http://www.3dvisor.com
http://www.emagin.com/3dvisor/html/product.htm
http://www.emagin.com/3dvisor/assets/eMaginz8003DvisorDS.pdf

They include stereo OLED displays at 800x600 and full headtracking.

Can you think of any potential compatability issues before I lay out $900 for them?

Im gonna cross-post this to HOTLINE. I wanna know the answer!

Save yer money, if SL is all you want it for. I've got one and SL completely barfs and locks up the whole system when you try it. Hell, SL wont even do anaglyph (red blue) stereo without choking. SL has never had stereo support. It's very disappointing. I hope it can be fixed one day.

Vote for it if ya want it:
http://secondlife.com/vote/index.php?get_id=624

I received them and they work ok.

With the latest nVidia drivers and stereo plugin, SL works fine in 3D.

I had to turn the stereo separation down quite a bit so I don't see double.

Once I tuned it, I could see 3d properly. Avatars and buildings look great.
The 2D UI elements look horrible and become very hard to read.
Forget about trying to chat or IM while you're wearing these.

The optics aren't the greatest when you have glasses. The furthest corner of the displays appear blurry to me.

Overall, interesting, but probably not worth the cost. Your cash is probably better spent on a larger monitor unless you're a 3d Fanatic like me.

-WW

I dunno what Im doin wrong, then. I have the latest drivers and I cant get 3d to work at all in SL.

The glasses do seem to have very "touchy" focus even in 2d. Have you tried changin the IPD? The eyepieces slide independently left and right. I also didnt realize at first that the eyepeice unit slides backward and forward. That adjustment helped me with focus. Changing those adjustments along with swinging the glasses toward my nose seemed to give me pretty good focus, in 2d. I can read text. I havent been able to test it in 3d, yet.

I agree that the focus seems softer toward the edges.

i've been wondering myself about stereoscopic gaming and whether sl was compatible with the current state of it (what little there is). anybody have any reticulated monitors/displays? i'd heard of a new toshiba lcd-stereo display last year or so, but don't know that it hit the streets...

i wouldn't necessarily be goggle-adverse, though i'd expect at least 1024 minimum res - do goggles generally top out at 800? (or perhaps, that's the stereo setting, as any capable graphics card has to do double-duty to render two fields at once?)

my fave wayne's world quote (though i can't remember the exact phrasing; i'll butcher the technicals of the joke:

garth: "that's wayne's basement... only, -that's- not wayne's basement. isn't that weird?"
wayne: "yeah, yeah... garth - that was a haiku."

Ive tried every !@#%$%^&* setting I can think of *twice* and I cant get stereo to work in SL! Aarggg!! What am i doin wroooong?

nyoko, i check up on these every year or so to see if they're "ready" for me yet. so far this one they're talking about looks to be about the best you're gonna find without adding a couple thousand bucks to the pricetag, and last i checked, even the expensive ones don't usually support a much higher resolution. i'm waiting for 1024 or greater around 5 or 600 bucks. then i'll be the first to buy

..would be nice if SL supported the built in head tracking in this also

i wants me goggles ;_;

It looks like this an SL issue. My Z800 works great with "Trees of Pangea," a SpeedTree demo. TOP doesn't say whether it uses D3D or OpenGl, unfortunately.

William, did you have to do anything special to get the z800 to do stereo in SL? I'm goin crazy, not being able to get it working.

's most appropriate, it seems... it's funny, strangely i'd expect 3d to be a bit farther ahead than just the current state of live rendering. shouldn't really be a prob on ll's part; much more a 3d graphics-card manufacturer's prob. (though 'prob' may be the keyword...)

just that -this- prob should be easier to tackle than pushing the envelope for gourard/raytrace rendering on the fly... at least, -i- think... i think that the current envelope should get pushed as far as possible, -then- push the next wave...

after all, once-ya got the little goober's hooked on 3d, wouldn't it be easier to push the texture/lighting envelope?? i mean, at this stage, 'standard 3d' would be such a big pusher for the display industry...

it's like the 'ipod video' prob i just read about earlier... supposedly, s.jobs has a prob thinking that ipod vid wouldn't be a big seller. i understand the one part of it - that the screen is too small - but on the other part, really, video is mostly -audio.- -audio.- i don't care about watching star wars original trig. at a very small size, as long as i can hear it in crystal-clear high-vbr mp3, or somesuch.

-video- is -always- so much about the -audio- ... and if you care about the vid, you're just storing temporarily until you plug the damn thing in to fire/usb2-stream it live to the bigger monitor you've hooked it up to.

it'll be standard someday, steve... you shoulda know'd dis by now.

Rumor is that emagine will be releasing an updated hmd with 2048 x 1024 resolution (and maybe other enhancements) next year.

I finally got my z800 working with SL. It's way cool! It has headtracking and stereo 3d! Now im addicted.

When I try to use mine, only half of the text shows up, as in part of the text completely disappears. The picture itself works wonderfully, but I have to keep going back to 2d mode to read any text.

How did you get yours so that the text displayed properly?

I do see *some* text vanishing. The majority of the text looks fine. What graphics driver version are you using and are you running at 800x600? Thats the only resolution the Z800 really supports. Are you running with the DDC VGA setting for STEREO TYPE?

I am running the 78.01 drivers from nvidia. (the latest ones available for 3d stereo display) i am running at 800x600, and I am running the DDC vga. The display works perfectly in World of Warcraft. but whenever I hit the control + T key to switch to 3d display while in second life, portions of the text go away. Only a couple of letters out of each word even display on the screen.

Sadly, I've stopped using my eMagin head mounted display. The optics are so poor that I find it hard to sustain. As much as I hate to say it, an investment in a really big monitor is more sensible.

I do hope they put much better optics into the next version. I don't think these sold that well, so there may never be another version.

i agree with the above statement, if its cheap the optics are crap and you will eat advil like mad, or your spend a grand on some nice ones but its still not as nice as that 21" lcd you could have had


also i have a old set of i=glasses, when i dont have a spitting headache i have a neck ache from keeping my head perfectly level so its not constantly tilting up slightly in view

I do hope Emagin brings out a model with higher resolution and better optics. Emagin already makes hmd's with higher resolution optics for the military.

Did William or some other kind soul see the question regarding correct settings for 3D views by the Z800? If so, can someone point out the correct place to activate this. I have got 3D settings for the test app working, so have the relevant drivers sorted.

Mike

Don't forget the screaming migraines these types of glasses cause with the majority of users. Most people using steroscopic systems like this end up with headaches from mild to severe after just 30 minutes of play or so. So if you can get a set for cheap, it's a nice gimmick, but in the long run, chances are you probabaly won't be using them.

My brother just got his Z800 yesterday and the first thing we did was fire up our (dormant) SL accounts and wander around.

It's a blast! I played for quite awhile last night without any kind of headache, and maybe it's just my 22 year old eyes but I haven't had any problems reading/chatting.. though the optics take some careful adjusting. I did seem to get a bit of a headache today.. I think the difference might be that today I played during the day, with lots of external light (the sun, and all that jazz) whereas last night I turned off all the lights I could and played in relative darkness. Something about the open design letting in the world around the edges of the screens perhaps? I'll definitely be trying it out more.

I do seem to have a problem with the head tracking, in that after awhile left and right movements start to translate into left-and-down and right-and-up movements causing a kind of dizzying drift. We're (brother and I) scurrying around various sources trying to resolve this as best we can though.

It'd probably help if LLabs took advantage of eMagin's SDK and tapped into the tracking data directly--instead of relying on the mouse emulation. This'd also solve the "relative movement" problem of centering. If you move around too quickly or go to extreme up/down positions you can lose track of what's "level." That is, your view will be skewed up or down when you should be looking totally level. As this is probably the best (by price) HMD around for the consumer, I think it'd be worth their time to look into.

As it stands right now, we're playing with the Z800 and a wireless logitech controller. The controller has various buttons for flying, running, left/right mouse clicks, WASD-directional controls, and (in a hackish way) handling the above centering problem by jumping in and out of mouselook (though it's very disorienting being popped in and out of your body whenever you need to re-center.. LL! Please! Apply that freely available SDK!)

Is anyone using the Z800 (or another HMD) regularly/semi-regularly? It seems a natural extension of SL to me, so someone must be doing it. I'd love to see it better supported.

Neeko, are you playing using the 3d stereo drivers from nVidia, or are you just playing in normal 2 mode?

3d stereo mode simply bluescreens my computer when trying SL with the newest nvidia drivers

DANGERS and MYTHS

Red/Blue glasses have been conventional because they are cheap to mass-produce for cinema or TV audiences, but they ruin the colour of 3D images. Outside of that, there are two main methods of producing full colour stereo vision: screens in a headset or LCD shutters in glasses.

If you want that immersive experience, a 2x 800x600 headset is okay for imagery: your brainwork (which you use all the time to create a 3D image from two 2D images in RL) masks the problem of lower resolution. You're looking at two slightly different SVGA images - not the same two lots of pixels) which your brain approximates into a 3D image.

If you want high resolution, you can use shutter glasses in combination with your existing screen. The headsets are light, have no optics to adjust and just block each of your eyes in turn to achieve a 3D image on your LCD or CRT panel. You don't loose track of the outside world. 2D text, etc. looks fine. This is at the expense of refresh-rates, however, as the alternating image means your frame-rate is halved. You can also use two pairs of glasses on one screen, which is cheaper than two VR headsets.

Some other background...

MYTH: radiation is bad for your eyes: There is no massive e-m radiation from LCD panels, so having them directly in front of your face is not like holding your head up to a CRT monitor.

There are TWO variables that your eyes use to match the distance of the item. FOCUS and ALIGNMENT.

In the real world, each eye automatically FOCUSes on an object, just like a camera, resulting in a 'depth of field'. Things are sharp over a small range and outside this field things are blurred. Working as a pair, your eyes also cross over to ALIGN the two images together, everything more distant or closer is double-vision. Your eyes become accustomed to the amount of FOCUS and ALIGNMENT required for a particular distance.

With VR headsets or 3D shutter glasses, your eyes FOCUS at the screen images, which are at a fixed distance and flat. In the case of a VR headset, the optics make it appear like a flat screen a few metres away, in the case of shutter glasses, you are focussing at your monitor. Everything is in focus: fantastic, however your eyes still have to cross over to bring the specific object that you are looking at into ALIGNMENT (this is what creates the 3D effect!). Unfortunately, your eyes are not used to remaining FOCUSed at one specific distance yet varying the cross-over ALIGNMENT to pick out objects in the images.

This is one reason why some people cannot see auto-stereograms or work with VR/stereoscopic equipment and also why some people get headaches.

Enjoy.