I almost forgot that such things even exist until I got my hands on Nanosaur 2 and saw how cool it looked with anaglyph glasses. Such glasses are an old invention, and the images are amzing. But what's wrong with the glasses, since I haven't seen almost at all images and games that use them; It's a simple and cheap way to mockup any game with a friendly author? Did some doctor say they weren't healthy for the eyes? Or is it just that a full color image withno depht is more worth than a half-full color image with full depth?

AFAIK it takes roughly twice the power to render in stereo.
Some games do support 3d glasses though. I don't remember many but I think one of the tomb raiders did.

I remember someone saying that they required 100hz refresh to be healthy, I'm not sure if that means 200fps performance or not! Also an ad said they were compatible with all D3D games without spesific support, an old ELSA card+glasses ad I guess.

Bah! Stereogram Quake is the future!

I'm able to play Nanosaur 2 with my Mac Mini and my monitor with 640x480 and the fps is perfect. With 800x600 it slows down only when more than a dozen mobile objects appear on the screen. 1024x768 is hopeless for less than G5 (2GHz), but it's not necessary.

What is Stereogram Quake?

A friend bought a set, but has only drivers for Windows XP. The screen is distorted, so that others cannot really see everything that is happening, but the glasses worked quite fine with Medal of Honour.

During the 3d movie craze in the 1950s (which were mostly using polarised light rather than red/green, but whatever) doctors opined that they might cause people to go permanently cross eyed but I somehow suspect that wasn't really a conclusion from evidence.

I briefly played with it - check out "Pang Clone", the second entry on my members.allegro.cc website. Judging by filesize I've almost certainly forgotten to embed the SDL framework into the OS X version, so that would require SDL installed UNIX style but I'll fix that tonight. The Win32 version should work straight out of the box.

Should anyone else want to experiment, note that glColorMask makes doing red/green 3d on OpenGL almost trivial.

As you'll see when you play with it, it's really more of a "try out some stuff" mini project than a complete game.

{"name":"Pang.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/2\/d21c797031ad6ad84e0b5fe17e6528bc.png","w":1024,"h":768,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/2\/d21c797031ad6ad84e0b5fe17e6528bc"}

That's really neat, although I think red/blue graphics tend to suck in color (or in general), because your eyes kinda flash between the two colors. I imagine you would go crazy after extended use (though I've never watched a significantly long movie in red/blue to say that for sure).

I think we just need holographic displays.

Marcello

I wish I had some glasses for that
Are there any glasses and techniques that can be used with realtime CGI that doesn't use red/blue?

Nooo, that'd be 100fps.

If you don't want interactivity you can use one of those single grey lens type glasses that just delay the image to one eye. By keeping the camera moving at a constant rate in one direction that gives the effect of 3d. I guess it could work well with a side scrolling shooter or something like that, although the main player sprites might seem a little weird. At least you get full colour and no extra drawing cost.

Otherwise I can't think of anything that doesn't require specialist equipment. You could theoretically use two polarised projectors and polarised glasses for a completely convincing image but I don't think anyone does, as those LCD shutter types just work with ordinary monitors.

It means 100+ FPS. Since shutter glasses work by alternately blanking the left and right eye while the monitor displays the view for the other, the effective FPS is halved. And you need at least 50 something FPS/eye to get over the flicker threshold of the blanking.

Probably not of too much interest, but I've rebuilt the small program I referred to above for OS X users so that it now has an embedded copy of the SDL framework (i.e. there is no need for a user to already have SDL installed) and I've also given it an icon and hopefully made it compatible with 10.2.

Yes, the colors are distorted, but not entirely gone, because there is the green still left. Nanosaur 2 (which is an OpenGL game) hasn't removed the green, and the colors aren't thus completely dead.

The VirtualBoy just about brought me to insanity and it only had red.