Real 3D image on a home monitor. Impressions from what he saw

Yesterday I had a chance to visit the laboratory of the F-Center. I will tell you about it in detail in the near future. And here I want to share my impressions of one device, which, in fact, served as the reason for this tour and, I must say, really impressed.

Those who follow the high-tech news, I think, have heard many times about the technology for obtaining stereo images. Zalman has been selling the Trimon ZM-M220W stereo monitor for quite some time , and competitors, for example, the iZ3D , have not remained in debt .

But recently, NVIDIA and Samsung joined the game.

Samsung released the seemingly unremarkable SyncMaster 2233RZ monitor on the familiar TN-matrix. But it has one interesting feature - it supports a sweep frequency of 120 Hz. Why does such a scan need an LCD monitor if it does not flicker even at 60 hertz? Firstly, as biased tests showed , a high frequency greatly increases the smoothness of a dynamic picture. I can confirm this, as I saw it with my own eyes: the most usual movement of windows is much smoother than on a standard-scan screen.

But this is not even the main advantage of such a monitor. More interestingly, a 120 Hz sweep made stereo imaging possible. This required an additional device, which NVIDIA was not slow to introduce - stereo glasses GeForce 3D Vision. In short, the technology is very simple: each eye is shown its own picture, as if different eyes are looking at an object from different angles. More details can be found in the review .

The most interesting thing is that this technology allows you to make truly three-dimensional any, even old, 3D-games, and in the future movies. Some special changes in the algorithms are not needed. The video card simply calculates and displays the image from two different points of shooting. This naturally doubles the load on the GPU. But to apply the same principle in films, you have to shoot with two cameras, by analogy with two microphones for stereo sound. Therefore, here, unfortunately, you will not be able to watch your old favorite movie in 3D.

I am not a fan of games, but what I managed to see was really impressive: an absolutely full-fledged sense of three-dimensionality of the scene!

The technology works so far only with NVIDIA cards and only with DirectX. Below are pictures.

Appearance of the kit:



This is the picture of a regular 3DMark movie on a monitor without glasses (I apologize for the quality of the photo):



The transmitter connects to the computer via USB and uses the IR signal to synchronize the frames on the monitor with the shutter operation on the lenses. The range is about 5 meters. The glasses have a built-in battery. All electronics are very compact and hidden under plastic.

There is, however, one tangible drawback - everything that you see around the monitor flickers at a frequency of 60 Hz. If you sit close, then this is not particularly noticeable, but if at least a little distance, then, I think, the eyes will tire.

But glasses work in any resolution of the monitor - if only the video card would cope (which they just won’t come up with to maintain the sales level of top-end GPUs :).

The viewing angles and color reproduction when using glasses do not differ from the usual mode of operation behind the monitor. Due to some darkening of the lenses, the contrast of the picture even increases.

The distance between the eyes is adjusted by the setting in the driver (not physically, of course, but the distance between the points of shooting;)

In general, the technology left an interesting impression.

Unfortunately, it will not be possible to show in the photo what a 3D picture looks like, so if you want to see with your own eyes, this is quite realistic - from today on, the stand with this monitor and glasses is open in the F-Center for everyone. You can also chat with the authors of the technical articles of the portal. I think there will be Oleg Artamonov, who wrote all the above reviews.

Update. The Ministry of Health warns about the harm from abuse of games :) In the comments, by the way, interesting things are mentioned about the insecurity of long-term use of such glasses. I can’t check, but it may well be. I personally consider such immersions in virtual reality unsafe. Looked - beautifully. But I will not use it. Purely academic interest.