Stereoscopic 3d with a PIC micro

tomy2 (Custom)

[Pyrofer] sent in his stereoscopic game project and we are just giddy with excitement. He has hacked apart an old TomyTronic 3D handheld viewer and put new guts in. He’s using a PIC micro to push stereoscopic imagery to twin LCDs. He wrote all code from scratch including the 3d library, wii nunchuck driver, and LCD driver. This thing even has bluetooth so he can play multiplayer if he ever makes a second one. The whole unit is kept alive via a lithium polymer battery so you don’t have to worry about any cords other than the wii nunchuck. This thing is awesome, we would love to play with one. You can see a video after the break.

Comments [12]

tagged: 3d, stereoscopic

Reader Comments

Looks like he has given up on the twin LCD screens and now just has one screen that works for both eyes. Somebody should come up with a view master hack that you can stick an iPhone in…

Posted at 9:13 am on Nov 4th, 2009 by John harrison

@John harrison

Would certainly save on the battery.

Posted at 10:06 am on Nov 4th, 2009 by bob

Sweet hack, and nice build.

Posted at 11:10 am on Nov 4th, 2009 by EFH

I remember having this game when I was 8. I screwed it apart and couldn’t get it back together… now 20 years later I wish I still had the parts.

Posted at 12:25 pm on Nov 4th, 2009 by Tom

interesting idea

Posted at 3:30 pm on Nov 4th, 2009 by therian

Looks like the craft from Elite.

That would be so cool, to be able to play Elite on a re-purposed Tomytronic 3D :)

You could throw an accelerometer into the mix so you have to tilt your head to steer the ship, like the Radica Stealth game which you hold like a Tomytronic 3D and has a rudimentary gyroscope like sensor for flight control but only one screen instead of two.

Posted at 3:55 pm on Nov 4th, 2009 by Haku

“My eyes…”

neat. so much cleaner than some of the other goggle hacks we’ve seen lately.

Posted at 4:29 pm on Nov 4th, 2009 by sly

@Haku
I like that idea a lot. : )

Posted at 5:11 pm on Nov 4th, 2009 by Zeno Arrow

I did something similar with a PSP. My biggest issue was getting the focus right to where it wouldnt give you headaches. The screen simply too small for this.

Posted at 7:18 pm on Nov 4th, 2009 by Roman Dulgarov

Not a hack. He didn’t make the LCD screen himself.

Posted at 3:19 am on Nov 5th, 2009 by George Stone

I took a walk across a pretty large toy store and I could find no View-Master-alikes and the personnel only shrugged when I asked them. This is funny, one’d think that they are not more obsolete today than they were 20 years ago when they were omnipresent.

On a side note: wouldn’t stereoscopic resolution be severely limited by low resolution of regular LCD displays? Youtube has some stereo clips and when I zoom them out to the resolution of a typical Nokia-phone screen, differences between left and right eye seem to scale away to sub-pixel range.

Posted at 10:14 am on Nov 5th, 2009 by svofski

@John Harrison

Do you mean something like this for Android based phones: http://phandroid.com/2009/10/27/android-virtual-reality-goggles-how-to-video/

Posted at 12:32 pm on Nov 5th, 2009 by amos1969