[chimera-dev] Zalman 3D

[Greg Couch]

On Fri, 20 Mar 2009, Amédée des Georges wrote:

> Dear Chimera developers,
> 
> We just bought in the our lab (Frank lab) a new Zalman 3D monitor
> (http://www.zalman.co.kr/Eng/product/Product_Read.asp?idx=219).
> Warren Delano has written an extension to get it to work with his Pymol. In
> our lab, we mainly use Chimera and it would be great if it became compatible
> with the Zalman system.
> 
> The way the Zalman monitor works is by giving a different polarization to
> each row of the screen. The software just has to send the infos for each eye
> in alternating rows. Would that be something doable in Chimera?
> 
> By advance thank you,
> 
> Amedee

You don't say what graphics card you have, nor which operating system, so 
I give you several answers:

(1) The current best option would be to use an ATI FireGL or FirePro 
graphics card on Windows or Linux, and configure the graphics card for 
horizontal interlaced stereo.  Then chimera's "sequential stereo" camera 
mode should just work.  I would expect that any workstation-class graphics 
card with stereo support work, but the graphics driver for Nvidia's 
Quadro FX graphics cards do not appear to support horizontal interlaced 
stereo yet.

(2) If you have an ATI Radeon or NVidia GeForce graphics card (or Intel 
motherboard graphics), then chimera would need to be modified to work with 
the Zalman.  I suspect that this is the case for you?  There is some 
disabled vestigial code in chimera for row-interlaced stereo.  I'll 
looking into dusting it off and getting it into the daily build.

 	- Greg