Having just recently bought a pair of eDimensional 3D shutter glasses for my Direct3D enabled games, and finding little or no good advice about this product (or its competitors) I have decided to post what I have found out so far with my own experience. I purchased these glasses (the wireless flavor with one additional pair) primarily for use with my LCD monitors and my DLP projector.
My primary LCD monitor is a 22" Samsung SyncMaster 225BW with 5ms response time. It supports up to 75Hz refresh but only when the resolution is reduced to 1024x768. I found that many of my 3D games didn't support a resolution of 1680x1050 anyhow (the native resolution of the monitor) and so running at 1024x768 was a reasonable option (although some in between options exist, albeit with lower refresh rates).
I am also using an ATI HD2600 video card. In my tests I used the eDimensional drivers.
The glasses basically work through a concept known as "binocular disparity". In real 3D environments, each of your eyes sees a slightly different image from a slightly different view point. By reproducing a fake disparity (based on 3D information in a rendered scene), one can discern depth with a similar amount of accuracy as in reality. Or so the theory goes.
Shutter glasses have typically had issues with LCD displays because of the different display technologies. The individual pixels in LCD displays persist for much longer than the pixels on a CRT, which is why LCD display quality is accompanied by a response time; a term that is irrelevant for CRTs. As a result, flicker free images are actually much easier to achieve on an LCD panel. Unfortunately for 3D shutter glasses this causes a problem. After the image for the left eye has been presented, the image for the other eye immediately follows while the former image still persists on the screen. I believe that the eDimensional crew have been able to get their drivers to work by sending a blanking signal to the expired side in order to eliminate visual cross-talk. The universal eDimensional drivers (vs other drivers such as the nVidia stereo drivers) are essential for this to operate correctly. So, if you want to use these glasses on an LCD display, it doesn't matter whether you have an nVidia card or otherwise as you will need to use the universal eDimensional drivers. Incidentally, I had less success with my full range of games than expected. Although, having said that, its also worth noting that it might be that different games have varying results with different brands of video cards in conjunction with the eDimensional drivers.
I would like to note here that using iz3D's drivers in anaglyph mode worked well (at least to some extent) with ALL of my 3D games. Yes, ALL of them! (iz3D produces LCD displays which are capable of the same sort of effect with only passive polarized glasses, but the monitor is substantially higher priced than the eDimensional glasses: approximately US$600 for the 22" iz3D display vs approximately US$100 for the eDimensional wireless glasses). The free iz3D drivers will also work on ANY monitor when set to "anaglyph" mode and you only need find a cheap pair of red-blue anaglyph glasses that sometimes accompany comic books and cereal packages. The problem with red-blue anaglyph glasses however, is that they can make a mess of colours and prolonged use can cause moderate eye strain and a headache (red objects on a white background for example, are completely invisible to one eye, which causes a little discomfort).
I wondered if the actual resolution that you operated the monitor at would have an effect on the quality of eDimensional's product. I supposed that running at native resolution would give better results than a reduced resolution. On an LCD display, when you run at a reduced resolution, you are actually stretching the signal to cover the entire display. So when I send a 1024x768 75Hz signal to my 1680x1050 display screen I am not getting a genuine interlaced image. 768 lines are being stretched across the 1050 lines of my screen. Each successive line spans a full line and a fraction of others. This is completely different from how a CRT handles different resolutions and scan frequencies. This did NOT seem to be a problem however, and I was able to get a reasonable image with a non-native setting.
In fact, the image separation in the lower half of the display is really very good! I can close my right eye, for example, and see a very clear left eye image with very little ghosting from the right side and with no apparent flicker! This at only 75Hz! Not bad! Unfortunately, the top of the monitor has extremely poor separation. Closing either eye makes almost no difference and I can see the double image of both eyes. This effect is increasingly noticeable the further above the center-line you look. At first, I suspected that it had to do with my viewing angle, but shifting my position made no difference. Finally, I was able to compensate by adjusting the 3D settings so that there was virtually no separation at far distances (which are usually rendered above the horizon) and producing all of the separation in the negative parallax (so the near objects appear in front of the monitor). I had really good success by doing this with my games, but still the 3D effect was always best in the lower portion of the screen.
The drivers that were shipped with my product installed some drivers into a folder named 5.0 (implying their version number). Yet, when I hover over the taskbar icon, they are described as eDimensional drivers v4.0! They are not the same as the v4.0 drivers I was able to obtain from the eDimensional website (different filesize and a different collection of support files)! Installing the two sets of drivers along side each other (even when only one driver was active) caused major problems for me. Many games just would not work at all while others had corrupted textures within the game. The best results I had was to uninstall the v5 (v4+?) drivers that originated from my install disc and use the v4 drivers from the website. The drivers on the shipped CD still had some texture problems, in particular some sprites used on HUDs were incorrectly scaled.
Another odd problem I had was that out of the two sets of glasses they sent me one was polarized in the wrong direction! Just slipping the glasses over my ears and peering at an LCD display produced complete blackness! By tilting my head, I could see an image which became brighter as I approached 90 degrees, but obviously this is not correct and with the glasses either activated or not, they continued to completely filter the image with my head oriented normally. The other set of glasses where polarized 90 degrees to this and worked correctly. Perhaps when you order a set of glasses from eDimensional you need to tell them that you plan to use them with an LCD display. I did not tell them, but at least I ended up with one good pair. Glancing around at a few other brands of LCD displays at work with the glasses on, demonstrated that they are polarized in the same direction (at least all of the various models in our office were). Presumably, the other pair would still work normally on a CRT.
After having incredible success with the iz3D drivers (anaglyph only), I was a little disappointed with the inability of the eDimensional drivers to work with my favorite 3D games. I continue to have problems with various 3D games, but I hope that eDimensional can eventually improve their drivers.
If you want shutter glasses that work with LCD panels, I believe that the eDimensional system is the only current solution, but has limited success. Don't bother dumping your ATI card in favour of nVidia, because with an LCD panel this is an irrelevant point. Also, don't bother buying a really expensive LCD just to get a higher refresh rate. LCD persistence makes for a good flicker free image at mediocre refresh rates.
I find that this enhancement does indeed improve the 3D gaming experience of supported games and prolonged use does not cause any apparent discomfort. However, I think that eDimensional will need to spend a little more time improving the drivers so that they work with a larger number of games.
© 2008-06-11
yet another web page Dunn by Paul