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Date |
: May 5th, 2001 |
| Category |
: Video |
| Publisher |
: Wicked3D |
| Author |
: Jin-Wei Tioh |
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We've come a very long way since the emergence of 3D accelerators such as nVIDIA's RIVA 128 and 3Dfx's Voodoo. Each successive generation brought more performance and features (trilinear filtering, FSAA, 32-bit textures, etc.) to the table, in part spurred by nVIDIA's aggressive 6-month product cycle.
However, for all the improvements made, the resulting 3D images are painted onto a very 2D surface, your monitor. Thus, while looking realistic, the on-screen action just doesn't seem to be in your face. One (admittedly old) technology can readily solve that, steoreovision. In real life, this is how we see things with two eyes. Our depth perception stems from the fact that each eye sees an object from slightly different perspectives, which serves as depth cues.
How do we get past this limitation? Implement stereo vision in the virtual world, which is exactly what Wicked3D did with the eyeSCREAM light. Unlike other attempts on the market so far, the eyeSCREAM light is not a hardware-based stereoscopic solution. Rather, Wicked3D has done a 180 and implemented stereovision in software. First off, how it works. The eyeSCREAM light tackles the task at the driver level, forcing compatible applications (more on this later) to render two separate images. When done correctly, your mind would do some fancy processing (no idea how many MIPS) to combine the images in such a way that you actually perceive yourself to be "in" the virtual world. As you can imagine, this would definitely increase the immersiveness of games.
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