[Chimera-users] Feature suggestions - based on risk of loss of sequential stereo options

Tue Dec 1 08:25:43 PST 2015

Here is another approach possibly coming in the future.  Maybe nvidia is getting back in the S3D game.
http://www.stereoscopynews.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4163:stanford-and-nvidia-prepare-next-gen-vr-displays-2&catid=40:3d-vr-ar&Itemid=556

I definitely recommend two monitors, one dedicated to 3D viz and the other for control.  On the mac, using chimera extensions I have created a third control surface that I push off onto an ipad.  My chimera extension has a button that moves windows around, putting the layout in/out of S3D, moves it to a projector, etc. I prefer SBS over sequential, and avoid it more as a matter of long term strategy. Just getting harder to find hardware and I do not think that will improve in the future; HDMI has deemed SBS and framepack as must have features for S3D, sequential does not make the list, and the list includes a dozen other optional S3D methods.

David is correct about the half view & mouse control.  Not sure a change in chimera could fix that.  Regardless my strategy is to avoid using the mouse on the 3D viz at every opportunity, hence the extensions.  What I am realizing using S3D is that I have to up my precision of control, which is difficult to do with a mouse. In some of my situations I need 6 orders of magnitude for the range of control.  With S3D, up close, rotating 1 degrees can be excessive and may require 0.01 degree movements as button pushes through USB-HID.

You should also avoid using zooming in S3D and keep it at unity. Actually I recommend never using zooming, people should be using z translation which they think they are doing with zooming. 

Matthew Dougherty
National Center for Macromolecular Imaging
Baylor College of Medicine
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________________________________________
From: David Bhella <David.Bhella at glasgow.ac.uk>
Sent: Tuesday, December 1, 2015 2:23 AM
To: Dougherty, Matthew T
Cc: Tom Goddard; Engelhardt, Peter; chimera-users at cgl.ucsf.edu
Subject: Feature suggestions - based on risk of loss of sequential stereo options

Further to Matt’s comment, SBS works very well for rendering/display in 3D but it is difficult to work with for interactive visualisation because you must work full screen and chimera doesn’t completely understand that the left and right halves of the screen are now superimposed.
Firstly accessing menus and the command line is problematic because you must move your mouse to the left eye view, so you need to mouse across the screen and off the left hand side. This is a relatively trivial irritation however.
What is more challenging is interacting with the model/volume to select rotate/pan etc.

So, to work with SBS 3D you must have a second monitor to handle all of the floating windows and non-3D stuff. It would be good to be able to float the display window and tear-off the drop-down menus and command line to view separately on the 2D monitor (perhaps you can already?).
Currently mouse selection tools are focussed on the left hand view, while the rotation control seems to focus on the centre of the display, so sometimes when you intend to rotate the model you end up just rotating about z (or vice-versa).
Perhaps it would be better to have all mouse interactions focus on the left-hand view and to have a visual cue to let you know when your mouse is over the left or right view?

I have both nVidia sequential stereo (on linux) and SBS (on a 32” 3D samsung TV on my mac), interactive work is so much more straight-forward on the sequential setup.

Dr David Bhella
MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research
Sir Michael Stoker Building
Garscube Campus
464 Bearsden Road
Glasgow G61 1QH
Scotland (UK)

Telephone:  0141-330-3685
Skype: d.bhella

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> On 1 Dec 2015, at 07:28, Dougherty, Matthew T <matthewd at bcm.edu> wrote:
>
> Sequential S3D is vanishing. Zspace uses it for their windows only apps.  Nvidia barely supports S3D as a technology. Not sure if any other chip makers are using sequential anymore.  Chip electronics have outpaced the need for sequential.
>
>
> SBS half, the chimera DTI option output as HDMI is your best bet, regardless of the OS.
>
> Some of the Samsung tv/monitors that do hdmi 2.0 now offer SBS half at 4k.
>
> This resolution is better than bluray S3D framepack under HDMI 1.4, and is probably the best you will get for the foreseeable future (ie, 5-15 years).
>
> Matthew Dougherty
> National Center for Macromolecular Imaging
> Baylor College of Medicine
> =================================================
> =================================================
>
>
> From: chimera-users-bounces at cgl.ucsf.edu <chimera-users-bounces at cgl.ucsf.edu> on behalf of Tom Goddard <goddard at sonic.net>
> Sent: Monday, November 30, 2015 4:26 PM
> To: Engelhardt, Peter
> Cc: chimera-users at cgl.ucsf.edu
> Subject: Re: [Chimera-users] Sequential stereo problems in Chimera in Mac after updating to OSX EL Capitan
>
> Hi Peter,
>
>   If Chimera says "Unable to find hardware stereo support  … “ when you enable sequential stereo it means the graphics driver does not support quad-buffered OpenGL stereo. Unfortunately Apple has not been interested in supporting stereo so I’m surprised you had it working recently.  For several years now no machines Apple sold supported stereo.  We had an ancient (8 year old) Nvidia Quadro FX 5600 in a Mac Pro until about 2 years ago, but the performance became so poor we abandoned it and had to switch to Windows.  The new Mac Pro cylinders did not support stereo.
>
>   Unfortunately Apple also doesn’t seem to provide any information on which systems support stereo.  We used to be able to get this information from the Apple OpenGL Capabilities web page
>
>   https://developer.apple.com/opengl/capabilities/
> OpenGL version 1.5 - Apple Developer Tools
> OpenGL Capabilities Tables. The following table lists OpenGL extensions and parameter values reported for each of the OS X versions, graphics adapters, and CPU ...
> Read more...
>
>
> but they stopped updating that two Mac OS versions ago (10.9).  Now the only thing I can find from Apple about OpenGL support is this page
>
> https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202823
>
> that lists the OpenGL version supported by each of their computers.  Quad buffered stereo is not a requirement of any OpenGL version so this page does not help find out about stereo support.
>
>   With Mac OS El Capitan (10.11) Apple has talked a lot about “Metal” which is an alternative graphics programming interface.  Chimera does not use it since it is Apple only and we need to support Linux and Windows.
>
>   In summary, I think Apple has dropped support for stereo on your systems.  Could you tell us what graphics card it was working with and which Mac OS version (Mavericks 10.10?).  Also if you use Chimera menu Help / Report a Bug… we will know the configuration that no longer works which will help us advise other Chimera users.
>
> Tom
>
>
>
>> On Nov 30, 2015, at 12:54 PM, Engelhardt, Peter  wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> No sequential stereo is working in Chimera after updating of our Macs to
>> OS X El Capitan -  10.11.1 in the CRTs linked to MacPros
>>
>> Error remarks:
>> - unable to turn on stereo viewing - "Unable to find hardware stereo support  ... "
>>
>> (see attachment).
>>
>> This problem has not appeared in with earlier OSX updates!
>>
>> We hope this problem will be fixed soon.
>>
>> Cheers
>> Peter
>>
>> Peter Engelhardt, PhD, docent
>> Adjunct Professor in Molecular Genetics
>> Unit of Molecular Electron Tomography
>>
>> Nanomicroscopy Center (NMC),
>> Department of Applied Physics
>> Aalto University, School of Science and Technology,
>> Puumiehenkuja 2, FI02150 Espoo
>> Finland
>>
>> Department of Pathology
>> Haartman Institute
>> P.O.Box 21 (Haartmaninkatu 3)
>> FIN-00014 University of Helsinki,
>> Finland
>>
>> Email: Peter.Engelhardt at Helsinki.Fi
>> Email: Peter.Engelhardt at Aalto.Fi
>> URL: http://www.lce.hut.fi/~engelhar/
>> Mobil: +358-400193342
>>
>> Home address:
>> Lindstedstvägen 1 B 7
>> FIN-02700 Grankulla,
>> Finland
>> Home Tel: +358-505113192
>>
>
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