[vtkusers] Stereo rendering on a GeForce 3 on Windows2000

[Robert Belleman]

Hi Jorrit and other Vtk enthousiasts,

I know little about stereo support for *Windows*, but some of you may
be interested to know that the latest *Linux* drivers from nVidia
(1.0-3123) contain support for quad-buffered stereo, but only on cards
with a Quadro chipset.

I realize that not many of will have had the funds to buy Quadro
chipset based graphics cards, but for all you GeForce2 owners out
there there's an interesting little hardware hack.

It turns out that the GeForce2 and Quadro2 chips are really the same.
The only difference on the graphics cards is a couple of resistors
which are connected to different pins on the chip. With a little careful
handywork it's possible to change your GeForce2 into a Quadro2, meaning
you can do stereo rendering on Linux and get a better performing
graphics card at the same time.

I recently applied this hardware patch to my ASUS V7700 and it works
beautifully with the ASUS 3D shutter glasses.

For more information on this hardware hack, read
http://www.tweakhardware.com/guide/quadro/

Let me stress again; I know this hack works on GeForce2 cards. I am
quite sure it will *not* work on GeForce3 and GeForce4 cards.
Also; don't blaim me if you try this hack and it fails in any way.


Now back to Jorrit's Windows question; the thing I do in Vtk to render
in stereo is the following:

  vtkRenderWindow renWin
    renWin StereoCapableWindowOn
    renWin SetStereoTypeToCrystalEyes
    renWin AddRenderer renderer

With Vtk's RenderWindowInteractor, pressing '3' will toggle stereo
on/off, otherwise call StereoRenderOn()/Off() like you do. I'm not
sure why you would need the StereoUpdate().

I agree that the empty case in the switch statement you mentioned is
puzzling, though I don't think it's the reason why stereo isn't
working for you.

Best,
-- Rob

-- 
[] Robert Belleman         X  Section Computational Science            []
[] robbel at science.uva.nl  |X| University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands []
[] tel: (+31) 20 525 7510  X  http://www.science.uva.nl/~robbel/       []

On Wed, Oct 16, 2002 at 11:38:59AM +0200, Schaap, J.A. (LKEB) wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to use the stereo rendering capabilities of vtk on the following platform
> 
> Windows2000
> GeForce 3 (driver 40.72 from NVidia + NVidia's Stereo3D driver 30.87)
> the Asus 3D shutter glasses connected to the Asus GeForce 3 card
> vtk nightly september 24
> 
> I'm constructing the vtkRenderWindow like this:
> 
> vtkRenderWindow *renWin = vtkRenderWindow::New();
> renWin->SetStereoCapableWindow(1);
> renWin->SetStereoTypeToCrystalEyes();
> renWin->StereoRenderOn();
> renWin->StereoUpdate();
> 
> 
> However, I don't get any stereo picture. It just shows the left-eye (or right-eye, I'm not sure...) picture all the time instead of swapping between the two eyes at 100Hz (display freq)
> RedBlue stereo is working properly by the way, but it doesn't look as nice :-(
> 
> 
> Are there any other settings? in vtk? in the display settings? in the OpenGL settings?
> 
> 
> Furthermore, I find the following piece of code quite peculiar (vtkOpenGLRenderWindow.cxx rev 1.63)
> 
> void vtkOpenGLRenderWindow::StereoUpdate(void)
> {
>   // if stereo is on and it wasn't before
>   if (this->StereoRender && (!this->StereoStatus))
>     {
>     switch (this->StereoType) 
>       {
>       case VTK_STEREO_CRYSTAL_EYES:
>         {
>         }
>         break;
>       case VTK_STEREO_RED_BLUE:
>         {
>         this->StereoStatus = 1;
>         }
>       }
>     }
> .....
> 
> Why is there an empty case for VTK_STEREO_CRYSTAL_EYES? Could this be why the stereorendering is not working?
> 
> Thanks for any answers.
> Best regards, Jorrit Schaap
> 
> 
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