Passive 3D TV Gaming Trick

[Rhettzky]

Such an awesome idea. But I can't help but wonder if your resolution goes down by flashing both images.

[Hack&Lube]

I'm not sure where the trick is. This is still a 3D TV, he is just saying you don't need to buy Sony's 3D TV so that the two players both get a different screen in multi-player.

Whether the resolution goes down or not depends on how that particular game does it's 3D. 3D naturally processes an image twice and drops your framerate in half. Most consoles today are very underpowered and weak and so the video quality settings do have to drop dramatically in some cases to maintain an adequate framerate (even 30 FPS).

[Rhettzky]

Is there some TV that does this already? I don't get it.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by Rhettzky

Is there some TV that does this already? I don't get it.

This is just a normal 3D TV and he is using it with PS3 games that support the dual viewing angle.

He is using this one:

http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product...=1&topnav=&s=1

[Rhettzky]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

This is just a normal 3D TV.

Yup, am I missing something?

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by Rhettzky

Yup, am I missing something?

As I said, this depends on the game, not the TV. This is not a trick but by design for Sony's new 3D TV for PS3s but he's just figured out he can use any off-brand regular passive 3D TV rather than Sony's active shutter glasses.

You don't need a Sony TV, you can use glasses from the theater, you don't need to pay Sony a gross amount of money for a small TV for gaming. That's cool I guess.

How the split screen works:
http://mystady.com/2011/06/sonys-3d-...ltiplayer.html

[SebC]

Lot of misinformation in this thread... even from Hack&Lube's post (and link).

There are two types of 3DTVs... active and passive. Active TVs alternate the image on screen. The glasses are essentially a pair of single cell LCDs that can either go transparent or opaque. For normal 3D only one eye is transparent at a time, to match the frame that the TV is displaying at that instant. The sony TV is active (so no, Hack&Lube's link, the glasses are not overpriced), but they do a trick where instead of alternating eyes, they go transparent for both eyes for every other frame. Resolution per-eye, or in SimulView mode, per person, is not affected, but framerate is halved. I'd imagine Sony is at least going 30 Hz per player, or it would look very choppy. The unique part is that the glasses support that mode, and there may be something different in the synchronization signal the TV broadcasts as well.

Passive 3DTVs are different. Each pixel is polarized one way or the other (typically alternating rows). The glasses just have a different polarizing filter for each eye, or in the case of SimulView, for each player. This is not what Sony is selling, but this is what the guys in the video are doing. (You can buy 3D to 2D glasses, but they probably don't let you choose between right eye view and left eye view.) With passive 3DTVs, per-eye or per-player resolution is halved.

So yes, you need the right hardware. Either a passive 3DTV with 3D to 2D glasses (probably homemade like these guys, at least for one of the players), or an active TV and glasses that support this special blanking pattern.

If you try passive glasses with an active TV, you will fail horribly. Chances are, if you have an active TV and glasses other than Sony's, you won't be able to make this work (especially if you bought 1st part glasses and not 3rd party ones). If you have a passive TV with Sony's glasses it won't work. If you have an active TV and Sony's glasses, it probably won't work. If you have a passive TV and do what the guys in the video did, it should work.

AVS forum thread has good info in it, including some 3rd party glasses that may support this mode for specific active TVs: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1368078