3D Visual Communications

9.3 Two-View Gaming Systems

Video games need reality and exciting components to attract customers. Therefore, new technologies are developed and easily accepted by the video game community. Since people see the world with their own two eyes, 3D stereoscopic techniques can provide an extra sense of presence. These 3D techniques become new attraction points for the video game industry. Furthermore, stereoscopy gives developers the ease of picking up things that look fake. Depth is important for correct perception of the virtual world, and setting the depth of the virtual scene properly is critical to the success of a game. The stereoscopic development environment can provide an extra tool for developers to check and correct visual defects by giving proper depth cues in the game before they are even used in a game during the development procedure. According to our discussion in Chapter 2, 3D polygonal meshes are the fundamental representations for games. As shown in Figure 9.5, applications deliver stereoscopic content to the customers by the following steps:

1. Applications issue geometry-based rendering commands to the graphics card.
2. The graphics card generates the frames for the left and right views through a stereoscopic pipeline which can be one of two possible forms as shown in Figure 9.6.
3. The two views are sent to the 3D vision-ready display units and the 3D-ready display delivers the interlaced images to the left eye and right eye separately.
4. Pairs of stereoscopic glasses help ...