Stereo using Chimera on 3-D Televisions

March 23, 2011

Matthew Baker at NCMI reports that stereo 3-d viewing with Chimera using LCD shutter glasses works from from a MacBook Pro laptop with Nvidia GeForce graphics (possibly GT 330M) using a 46" Samsung 3-D TV (Samsung - UN46C8000 46" 1080p 3D LED TV). He reports that it worked at 720p resolution but not 1080p using the Samsung's built-in infrared emitter and presumably Samsung LCD glasses. He used the Mac laptop mini-to-DVI video adapter to connect the laptop to the TV.

This result was surprising because on non-Mac machines we believe sequential stereo in a window is not available with the consumer-level Nvidia GeForce series of graphics cards. In the past at least a more expensive workstation graphics card, the Nvidia Quadro series or ATI FireGL was required. The consumer cards were only able to do full-screen stereo (used in many video games), and not the stereo-in-a-window that Chimera requires.

We believe Mac desktop machines with standard consumer Nvidia and ATI graphics cards are able to do sequential stereo in a window based on tests running Chimera in sequential stereo mode where the expected flickering is observed in the graphics. But it is not clear whether the synchronization signal needed by the LCD glasses is available from the desktop cards. We do not currently have a 3D TV to test this.