Sega 3-D Glasses: How did they work?
nicole.express
nicole.express
The demo program was a robotic arm simulator that my partner already had on hand, since it could easily render wireframes. The updated simulator rendered two wireframes of Optimus Prime, so with the driver in place, he floated in front of the screen.
And, of course, you could rotate him in space, and then hit the space bar to transform him in 3D.
I hacked up a Powerglove to connect to my PC. Always wanted to get the Sega glasses too but didn't have the resources at the time.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3165591-the-virtual-real...
I still have that VR book in my basement. Along with my first computer book, Practical Things To Do With A Microcomputer. Usborne has these online: https://usborne.com/ca_en/books/computer-and-coding-books
I want to know more :) and my googling skills are failling me. But I didn't even realize you could do 240p/60hz on a CRT. To be honest I even assumed that CRT more or less means interlaced for some reason...
Edit: ok, I should've clicked the links in the article! This page pretty much completely answers my questions!
It's used in the retro gaming community to get hardware accurate video output from emulators.
This is also why a lot of old 240p consoles (NES/Master System through to PS1/N64/Saturn ) look even worse on modern TVs than you would expect them to - the TV tries to deinterlace the signal, but it's not really interlaced. With a 240p aware linedoubler converting your signal to 480p HDMI you can get much better results, and much lower latency.
I trained myself to look at these kinds of things cross-eyed so I can see the 3d effect without glasses.
All I remember of them was that when they worked they were brilliant, albeit a little dim. Mostly all they did, though, was expose all the shortcuts developers took, particularly with UI elements. Everything in the scene would be wonderful 3D, but the UI elements would be all over the place, distorted, etc. etc.
I also posted a plea in the thread the other day about dumb tvs [2]. There are passive 3d stuff with bad viewing angles. But I do love my 3d content and dont mind glasses.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140325101340/https://www.nvidi...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35484594&p=4#35488578
Edit: if you happen to have a 3d tv still, it might be possible to tell it you've got frame sequential 3d content and then use its glasses. Possibly.
But awesome writeup! Reading how they worked I finally understand why I got the headache :)
I had a Master System as a kid and was disappointed when I purchased Maze Hunter 3D and brought it home only to find I could not play it without the glasses. No wonder they were discounted.
However, I did read in a book that Space Harrier 3D had an Easter egg that allowed you to disable the 3D feature, but you had to get on the high score screen to execute the code. I ended up buying that at a discount. I got quite good at getting through the first level of the game without the 3D glasses.
Moving from mono sound to stereo doesn't require anything of the listener. Going from black and white to colour doesn't require you wear special equipment.
But 3D? You have to put on special glasses which you also have to remember to charge. Oh, and you can't look at other things while you're using them.
There were some passive 3D displays (the Nintendo 3DS and a few early Android phones) but they required the user to stay in exactly the right position, or the illusion was destroyed. So you couldn't easily share the experience with a friend.
Until we have TVs which can shoot lasers directly into our eyeballs, I think the barrier to entry is too high.
Do I press the button on the left or the right? Is it one tap to see the real world or two?
Generally to pass through the real world you'd do something like simulatenously press two easily accessible buttons on your tracked controller. It is really very easy and I use it often.
EDIT: Apparently ASUS has a laptop that does this too! https://www.asus.com/content/asus-spatial-vision-technology/
With VR, the majority of popular games can't be ported 1:1 to VR. It either adds nothing so it's not worth it, or motion sickness requires removing or reinventing movement. It's almost like starting game design over from scratch.
it's unfortunate because VR GT7 was really cool until i started feeling horrible, but the sickness was very strong like from riding on a spinning carnival ride. i had to lie down the rest of the evening each time it happened.
If you try to fight through the nausea at all, it'll get worse every time until you feel sick just thinking about VR
(That's the obnoxious training regimen he's talking about, and it sucks for sure)
Passive 3-D glasses exist, and you can very much look at whatever you want while wearing them.
> There were some passive 3D displays (the Nintendo 3DS and a few early Android phones) but they required the user to stay in exactly the right position, or the illusion was destroyed. So you couldn't easily share the experience with a friend.
I had an HTC EVO 3D, and would kill to get that technology back. If friends and I can only look at stuff in 2-D at the same time, fine, nothing lost over the current status quo. But looking back at your pictures and videos in actual 3-D immerses you in the moment again in a way that's hard to describe.
is there a consensus to why this is? was it just a fad/phase, or is it just too physically demanding so people literally and figuratively tired of it?
i do like the games where you can use motion controls of the controller to enhance your aiming.
or is it just too physically demanding so
people literally and figuratively tired of it?
Also, existing control methods (gamepads, keyboards, mice) are really good. If you think about it, they are miracles of efficiency and accuracy. Compared to motion controls, you do an order or two of magnitude less work, and in return you get an order or two of magnitude more precision in many cases.
There are some genres that are fun with Wiimotes. Wii Sports is always fun for short bursts at a party. Also arcade light gun style shooting games are just phenomenal. But in general, yeecccch.
The original Wiimote only had an accelerometer, that worked well enough in a game like WiiSports where all your actions are predetermined and you only need to measure how 'hard' the player moved the controller. But that approach doesn't work in games where you have multiple actions at the same time.
MotionPlus added an gyro, that's better, but still not good due to lacking a magnetometer, so you had to constantly recalibrate it every couple of minutes. That gets old fast. It also still had no position sensing, so still a lot of guesswork involved in trying to figure out what the player was actually doing with the controller. The Nintendo Switch is also still stuck at this level.
Meanwhile Playstation Move had full 6DOF tracking all the way back in 2010, no need to ever recalibrate thanks to a tracking camera. Amazing in theory, but in actuality that controller was handicaped by a terrible button/stick layout, as in they didn't have any analog stick on the 6DOF controller and instead had a untracked NavController with only one stick. This rendered the Move controller impractical for most regular games. Worse yet, they never updated it and kept using it on PlaystationVR, only finally replacing it this year with PSVR2. The Move controller handicapped a whole decade of motion gaming.
Would a better controller succeeded? Hard to tell. Gyro-aim is still popular on SteamController, Switch and Playstation and is a big upgrade over stick controls, but not as widely adopted as it should be, due to Microsoft not having any motion sensing in their Xbox controller, thus making it impossible for multiplatform games to depend on it. The laser-pointer input of the Wiimote was also working really well and is essentially what most VR games use for UI navigation, but it requires having a split controller.
Going the obvious path of just taking a regular controller, splitting it in two and adding motion tracking to each half was never done by any of the big companies. Even modern VR controllers don't go that route and end up with a layout that is unsuitable as a drop-in replacement for a regular controller.
https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Wiimote/MainPage...
They added motion plus later, which was better, but also required frequent recalibration.
In addition to Nintendo, MS and Sony took a shot at it. I don’t blame Nintendo, I think people just stopped caring.
The top of the line is still Quest 2, the display (120Hz) and fresnel lenses are better than most more expensive alternatives.
And with DAS FrankenQuest you have comfort.
Unfortunately Echo VR (the ONLY native game) closes in August!
I do not expect the Quest 3 to deliver much benefit over the 2. Maybe the Quest 3 lite they are talking about.
Surprisingly the Quest 2 is still DDR4 and has the same GFLOP as a 1030.
There is also the issue of subjective motion sickness sensitivity that seems to conflate comparisons, some seem to get sick in any VR with certain games or environments, and everyone gets sick in some specific VR headsets. If you don't get motion sick easily, quest2 is pretty comfortable, and once you find some decent games it's unique and re-playable, more than a mere novelty.
Lots of folks on HN seem to have tried one thing once at some point in time - either got motion sick or got confused why the onboard graphics sucked, and then just relegated the whole category to "still broken". VR works if you can be bothered to do as little research as you do for your next PC.
> Unfortunately Echo VR (the ONLY native game) closes in August!
I don't get what you mean by native though, there are loads of native quest games.
Should have said "custom", but then that could also be misunderstood.
In my experience (I made the first VR MMO: http://aeonalpha.com, with the wrong programming language!) high refresh rates in sensor reading (faked by Oculus/Valve) combined with locomotion that the brain does not immediately associate with human motion are the best solutions after hardware.
But I will make my 3D action voxel MMO 3rd person just to make sure, if your head is the camera you wont get sick as easily, specially at 120Hz.
120 FPS at low persistence is the bare minimum if you want to not get ill from any smooth movement during long sessions = Echo VR is the ONLY game that is playable on Quest 2.
Non-smooth movement games are more of a slideshow/shooting gallery; (see HL:A :S) akin to the early fixed space 3D games on cd-rom if you remember those, which funnily HL was the first (after quake that I never played) to break:
I fondly remember me and my brothers jaws dropping simultaneously when we by mistake moved the mouse during the intro, we both 100% thought it was pre-rendered.
The difference is now we have permanently peaked in hardware, so we need to solve things with software.
I haven't tried "Tea for God" yet, kinda dreading the adb install since computers can get bricked when you do real work on them these days.
Baffling that in 6 years, 1 billion humans (that could have bought a headset and built something) only managed to create 3 custom engines for VR: Source 2, Lone Echo and "Tea for God".
Odds are not looking good.
You make it sound like VR motion sickness is the norm, but it’s really not. Tons of people play VR games every day with smooth locomotion, on “potato VM” game engines, at 72 or 90 Hz without issue.
Even if perf were a widespread issue, building a custom game engine for VR probably shouldn’t be your first choice when there’s so many easier ways to optimize.
It's definitely worth being careful to avoid GC causing frame drops, but I'm pretty sure there are a lot of good-performing VR games written in Unity
And it's getting worse by the day.
The company is bankrupt, and when interest rates go up further all your invested time will go poof in a second.
Own your time, and control your future: when you use Unity you learn very little about how the GPU works, which kinda is the point, but since OpenGL 3 is the final 3D interface with VAO you only need to learn it once for eternity.
Fascinating info, thanks for sharing. I was aware of the two Cryengine games and the omnipresence of Epic’s engines, but I didn’t realize it was that lopsided.
Absolutely agree with the claim that “non-standard locomotion” is best for avoiding VR sickness - games like Gorilla Tag and Echo Arena really have a sort of “presence” factor that goes beyond 99% of VR titles.
Strongly disagree on the claim that VR sickness is a widespread issue - outside of Boomers/GenX who didn’t grow up playing video games. But I digress since I’m sure other posters will be jumping on the claim haha.
Btw, Tea for God is in the App Lab [1] so you shouldn’t need to mess around with ADB or Sidequest. If you enjoy the unique “pseudo infinite space” thing it has going on, you’d probably also enjoy “Eye of the Temple”. It’s currently on Steam[2] and in development for Quest, but it does the infinite spaces thing with an Indiana Jones style twist and is quite enjoyable experiencing the clever ways the dev came up with to trick you into thinking you’re physically exploring a huge space while actually remaining mostly still in reality.
[1] https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/3762343440541585/
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/589940/Eye_of_the_Temple/
Probably a temporary thing, but still I need to upload it with adb because that is how you develop for this thing.
Android is horrible now, I remember making something for the HTC Hero back in 2009, that was nice... now you have to install many GB of junk to even get started.
I think there are only a couple headsets with pancake lenses at this point in time. Supposedly the PSVR2 has more advanced fresnel lenses than prior headsets of the same kind as well but I'm not versed enough in the technology to know.
HDR is the reason for this, they need more brightness, so they sacrifice low persistence.
Also all AAA experiences on PSVR2 run at 60 FPS and re-project to 120 FPS.
So it's actually worse then my initial comment. Echo VR does 120 FPS without re-projection on a 15W device vs. 60 FPS on PS5 at 350W!!!
I have been sucking in too much VR news lately after a 7 year hiatus (not counting 3 HL:A playthroughs) so I confused all the info, thx for setting me straight!
I don't get motion sickness from the PSVR2 like I would occasionally with the Rift CV1 but again, I'm not super knowledgeable about any of the underlying technology.
"When you look at a 2-D movie, it's already in 3-D as far as your mind is concerned. When you see Lawrence of Arabia growing from a speck as he rides toward you across the desert, are you thinking, 'Look how slowly he grows against the horizon'? Our minds use the principle of perspective to provide the third dimension. Adding one artificially can make the illusion less convincing."
-Roger Ebert: Why I Hate 3D Movies https://www.newsweek.com/roger-ebert-why-i-hate-3d-movies-70...
It would be interesting to know if the "less realistic" effect was also something experienced by viewers at the time of the shift between monochrome and color movies. And if it was overcome by technology improvement, or by viewers simply getting used to the new media.
Other than that, they may have seen a Pixar movie or Hugo in true 3-D. Or the Transformers one where they rampage through Chicago.
Otherwise, it has all been post-processed fake-3-D crap that unsurprisingly turned audiences off.
Also there's a misconception that 3-D is only good for spectacular movies. Hugo showed otherwise, and anyone who has experience taking 3-D pictures knows that the best ones are often indoor scenes of dinner tables or rooms or normal objects, or water.
The younglings I know all loved the PSVR2 experience much more so than the Quest which they were fans of before. So therefore probably more attuned, highly plastic brains to boot.
I also get motion sick sometimes. It depends on the game, cockpits usually are fine. Those are the ones I’m more interested in anyways. PSVR2 is a literal game changer IMHO.
The lack of resolution could of course be overcome by native VR content, that is build towards the other strengths of those headset. But there just doesn't seem enough interest in the industry to actually go that route, you can still count the total amount of good AAA content for VR on one hand. That's not enough to attract gamer's in mass and in turn developers aren't all that interested either. Xbox still staying away from VR isn't helping either, as that cuts off a large chunk of the potential market too.
As for motion sickness, that's a somewhat unsolvable problem. Everything that makes the virtual body move without your real body moving will make people sick, no matter how good the headset is. One solution is to not move the virtual body (teleport locomotion), but that drastically limits what games you can do in VR and has been largely abandoned again by most games. The other alternative is to just get used to it, most people can adopt to some degree, but it can take time. I think the only real solution here is a generational shift, once every kid grew up with VR, the motion sickness issue might fade away, but that'll still take many years or even decades.