Hello everyone and welcome to our "Stereo3D" section in which we will explain the Stereo technology used in stereo 3D Goggles.

But first a question .. what do you think when you read about this particular topic called 'stereo'?

• Surround Sound?

• A new Dolby Digital feature?

• Another new feature like FSAA or TileBasedRendering?

Let us make it a little paradox and need to forget instantly as this is what it is NOT.

The term Stereo3D means nothing less than to bring the third dimension to your 3d games and applications for real. To understand what exactly you experience when you put on those goggles you need to understand the technology and what it does to the brain.

Stereo technology is adding that other dimension of realism to the brain. Face it, we all want to be in a 'virtual reality', would it be good to play Tomb Raider with the optical illusion you are in that 3D scene ? This is what the technology is about and exactly what it is trying to do.

Introduction

The idea of stereoscopy is nothing new, it was always a wish of the consumer to not only have 2-dimensional pictures, but to keep a kind of 3rd dimension, to make pictures look more realistic.
Back in the 19th century, when the first photographers were made, the people began to think about stereoscopic pictures.
So they developed stereo cameras and viewers. At this link for example you can find photographers dated at 1886.

(This is a stereoscopic viewer called
"Tru-Vue" from about 1930)

The idea is based on the humans biology:
We have 2 eyes which both deliver 2 slightly different pictures of the same situation. The further an object is away, the less these 2 pictures will differ and the other way round, the nearer an object, the more different these two pictures will be.

So the only thing we need is some hardware (a stereo viewer, 3d glasses, ... whatever) that gives us these two "slightly different pictures". Take a good look at the image below:

This figure gives a good example,
how the 2 pictures get combined in our brain.

If you like to learn more of the biological aspects then you should visit the site vision3d.com.