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From: dartvax!batcomputer!andyrose@uunet.UU.NET (Andy Rose)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Stereoglasses, active technology
Message-ID: <7571@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 14 Sep 90 17:54:42 GMT
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Sender: hlab@milton.u.washington.edu
Organization: Cornell Theory Center
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Bruce Land, manager of Visualization and Information Technologies
at Cornell Theory Center has plans for 3D glasses drawn up and
ready to go.  These are based on SEGA game glasses ($30-$50) and
an RS-232 connector with some capacitors and stuff.  Total cost is 
well under $100.

For these to be effective you need a computer which can alternate
between two graphic buffers at rates quicker than 10 times a second.
30 times a second is of course great.  This is not to tough for 
displaying a left eye frame and than a right eye frame of a static
image.  If you wish to animate, you need to compute a left eye frame
and a right eye frame and display them at the above rates.  This
is not easy.  Silicon Graphics, Stardent, RS6000, and other machines
in this class can barely do it, especially as quantity of polygons
grows.  

Basically you send a pulse out the serial port to tell the glasses to 
dim the open lens and open the dim lens.  The dimming is accomplished
with a 5v 400hz signal.  See the schematic for power requirements.
It would be nice to build a set with batteries, or even infrared
for wireless.  And having a super duper hard disk with direct access to
the display memory (consider the screaming disk) which could dump
1 megabyte (640*480*24 bits) images at 1/30th of a second would also
be cool.  Then you could atleast display precomputed frames in real time.

One manufacturer at SIGGRAPH suggested I by 9 of his disk drives and put them 
in a ring around the video memory and blah.. blah.. as his voice grew
fainter.

send e-mail to OX7Y@CORNELLF.TN.CORNELL.EDU for the plans.
Don't forget to mention you heard it here first...

This is of course all free...

-- 
Andrew Newkirk Rose '91
Department of Visualization
Cornell National Supercomputing Facility / Theory Center
632 Engineering and Theory Building