Stereoscopic Mode
A desired feature for Second Life is the ability to view the world in Stereoscopic Mode. There are few ways this can be accomplished.
The CtrlAltStudio Viewer has a configuration option which provides Stereoscopic 3D output that displays according to the capabilities of the graphics driver and equipment used. For example, a GeForce graphics card with NVIDIA 3D Vision IR transmitter and active shutter glasses plus a 120Hz monitor can be used.
The University of Michigan has submitted patches (see VWR-2972) to make Stereoscopic 3D work, but changes to the drawing code have since broken the patches.
The patch allows a user to go into Preferences > Advanced Graphics and enable stereoscopic mode. Once this is done, there are 4 ways in which it may work:
- Anaglyph
- which uses glasses with lenses that are Red and Cyan.
- Passive
- Requires either two projectors with polarized filters or page-flipping goggles, like the Z800 or other Head Mounted Displays (HMD).
- Shutter glasses
- requires shutter glasses.
- Cross-eyed auto-stereogram
- requires no additional hardware, but just a split screen and some practice.
More information about these modes and where to get the required hardware is here: http://sl.daleglass.net/#stereo
With Second Life running in Stereoscopic mode and the proper device and stereoscopic driver, the user can perceive the actual depth of objects in world, the world should appear as if it is actually in 3D. Without the proper device, this type of rendering looks visibly different and is not possible for use.