[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k7Vc10YsDk&feature=player_embedded%5D
If you’re on the fence about 3D TV and related technologies [Anton B.] might be able to help you decide. No, he’s not going to shove pamphlets in your face and explain why its the wave of the future. Rather, by showing the hack-ability (its a word) of 3D shutter glasses. A simple bridge of wire across specific contacts can ‘trick’ the glasses into only displaying only the left or right picture.
Wouldn’t that make it just a regular 2D TV again? Yes, that’s the beauty of it. Person A could be watching a completely separate movie pr0n than person B, but all on the same TV. Or two people could be playing a video game, without dividing the screen in half. The only problem is the current lack of software that can interlace movies/games, who’s up for writing some C++ this weekend?
This I would buy a TV for, multiplayer games without the splitt screen! Amazing!
isn´t it this what sony was developing?
I think Sony got a Copyright on that. Tought I read about it in conjunction with 2 Player 2D Games.
Cool idea!!! This would definitely be a neat hack. Not likely I’ll be running custom software interlacing my Xbox360 input with my cable box… but potentially through a set-top computer it’d be feasible.
If the glasses had a Left/3d/Right toggle switch from the manufacturer, that’d be best, but I’d imagine a hardware hack on 130+$ glasses, times two, would be a bit extreme.
The whole 3D thing has not been any interest to me anyway. Being blind in one eye makes 3D (the kind that doesn’t use polarized glasses anyway) rather depressing.
This hack on the other hand, could be very useful to someone like myself.
Im sure sony patented this idea with mind for playing two player games on ps3, three or four months ago it was a games console news feed i read but still great hack and has many uses.
Neat idea but then everyone would need their own headphones too unless you want to hear crap from your roommate playing Halo while you watch No Country For Old Men. It would be cool to see this using polarized displays and glasses instead of shutter glasses.
except that the post-processing the boxes or TV might do would be doubled, thus requiring a special TV/Box for the job
I’m sure you could write drivers for a 120 Hz computer monitor and test it there though. Probably a better place to start.
I can do the software in vb.net… what refresh rate is it? but damn 2 video sources at once on a tv… That will be amazing for playing multiplayer localy just have them wear the glasses
@Luke How would you overlay polarized screens without them canceling each other out? e.g. If one places a horizontally polarized screen in front of a vertically polarized screen you will only be able to see the vertically polarized screen even with horizontal glasses.
it will probably be cheaper to use a polarized monitor and swap the lenses in two glasses. as for software, i’m sure it can be done with ffmpeg or mplayer and a pipe.
That’s an amazing idea. He should patent it QUICKLY.
Unfortunately, the idea has already been patented by Toshiba so it is officially forbidden to have the same idea. Please stop hacking, erase your brain, and write to your MPs about the silliness of the patent system.
Love the idea!
ok now that they have the picture figured out.
How are you going to do sound with out headphones?
Just so everyone knows, patents don’t matter unless your trying to sell it! but as he is meerly showing us, no one can do anything about it!
Plus i like this idea seems pretty cool!
Has anyone thought of the John Carpenter THEY LIVE Implications of this? I know the Times square displays are only like 20hz, but were looking at publik stego being just down the road there arent we?
As someone who used to play Golden Eye and Diddy Kong Racing split-screen on a 9″ TV, this is appealing.
I imagine a future where we have video screen walls, the family of four is sitting on the couch together each one watching their own show. Family time…. sort of… *snif*
yea family time where everyone is commenting about different shows at the same time, then a shut-up no you shut-up argument tween the kids so dad gets pissed and drags them off to their rooms
meanwhile mom decides its a great some soda and comes back, puts on the wrong glasses and see dad was watching a porn
heartwarming future : )
neat hack..
now can someone extend this a bit so that it works with a DLP projector, in theory this could be done with any old surplus fast LCD panel, with front polariser removed.
interesting modification would be to adjust the 3-D goggles so that they switch only on one in every three frames, this way three people could use the same screen with a decrease in frame rate..
you would need to adjust the goggles however, by rotating the displays so that the polarisations line up…..
this is just beautifully simple.
why? you don’t need a single line of code for this.
reason: all 3d tvs are required to understand the “side-by-side” format with both views packed into a single full hd frame. you loose half of horizontal resolution, but all you have to do is arrange two media player windows next to each other and switch the tv to side-by-side. presto.
One of the problems with systems like this is figuring out if the left-frame or the right-frame is currently being displayed. (This systems seems to know somehow. I’m not sure how.)
Counting VSYNC signals and having the user select L/R is another way, but it depends on being able to produce every-other frame content exactly.
I couldn’t do that on ancient Cray machines (1990s). so I invented a way to synchronize the LCD shutter glasses using a square of data embedded in the images themselves. Left images have a white square and right images have a black square. Then a photo detector placed at the front of the screen reads the image type and sets the LCD shutter glasses automatically.
It looks like modern glasses are WAY WAY more sophisticated then the SEGA glasses I had to work with. Great improvement.
You can read about it if you like at patent #5,245,319 “Synchronized stereoscopic display system”
No, I didn’t get even $1 for this patent. The company spent all the thousands of dollars to get it patented, so I’ve got no gripe.
Instead of headphones, just use ultrasonic interference speakers to generate localized sounds. (probably still patented and hard to actually buy)
Stick LEDs on the glasses to provide visual reference for the speakers to aim at, a la Wiimote.
@Perry,
Patents dont even matter then. They only matter if the patent holder deems it worth trying to uphold the patent.
so u take a 120hz tv, and split it into 4 individual feeds at 30hz, or do 2 at 60hz so you can play battleship multiplayer without your opponent seeing where your ships are, or play multiplayer shooting games without your opponent knowing where you are at all times, so you can truly sneak up on them/snipe. i’ll wait 6 years for it to become mainstream
@AlanKilian: Interlaced scanning is one way to reliably encode left and right images. With a true interlaced signal this alternates left and right eye views on vsync. If your hardware only supports progressive scan a line blanker can be used to simulate interlaced scan.
Alternatively, you can encode the left and right views one above the other and inject an additional vsync pulse half way down the screen (sync doubling).
Both methods result in a loss of horizontal resolution, as opposed to alternate frame which results in a loss in frame rate.
id say buy a 600hz monitor and do 4 player at 150 hz each :D
edit: that way you could even do 3d at 75 hz for everyone, but means you have to render 8 times more than usual
3d vision compatible players (like the one on nvidia’s site) already come with an option to load a separate left and a separate right video file… audio will only play from one of them
also, what the hell is that guy saying “remove polarizer from normal lcd display” THIS IS FOR ACTIVE SHUTTER LENSES, NOT POLARIZED DISPLAYS, also the polarized displays have a microfilm layer that polarizes every other line differently, the polarizer before and after the lcd matrix is still there…
there are no 600hz monitors out and it would be impossible to make them currently anyway (other than LASER technology, no other technology makes this possible). it would also require a TON of bandwidth, more than something like quad link dvi could provide (and there is no quad link dvi)
shutter glasses make the display atleast 2x darker than it normally was anyway, so this kind of “sharing” isnt very practical for more than 2 people anyway
In the future I see 3D TVs comming with glasses/earbud combos, two remote controls and the ability to watch two programms at once, and they will cost a shitload when they come out.
let them come out, then maybe I can get a HDTV for a reasonable price
How exactly does the left right work?
Is it basically switching the image from LEFT to RIGHT, then the glasses block either the LEFT or the RIGHT? or is it way more complex then that?
@willy:
That’s pretty much how shutter glasses work. One 1px black/white LCD over each eye. The glasses alternate which eye is allowed to see, while the screen displays the corresponding left/right images.
Or, as the story goes, you can black out both eyes at once (alternating between two sets of glasses) and displaying player1/player2 images on the screen. Quite ingenious!
mercedes are the men.
their command aps (navi system with dvd+hdd) can do it in the sclass – driver got navi – copilot the dvd and trust me it´s awesome.
that finally done in a normal tv… WANT WANT WANT!
http://fluid.media.mit.edu/people/pranav/current/thirdeye.html
(but “it’s” is the correct word)
Im a tech at a mercedes dealership. One of my jobs is to activate the split view feature on those s-class’s. Its really cool. 2 people can view 2 diffrent things on the same screen at the same exact time. no need for glasses either.