VMD-L Mailing List

From: Dan White (dan_at_chalkie.org.uk)
Date: Mon Mar 13 2006 - 08:17:46 CST

Dear All,

after reading the post below, for a new quad buffered stereo plugin
for OSIRIX,
I though I would try it out on my older apple G5 with GeForce
FX5200, just for a giggle, not expecting it to work
on this older graphics card. OSX 10.4.5

As far as I am aware, the only card apple recommends for quad
buffered stereo is
the new quadro card that comes in the new high end G5 quad?

However, to my amazement, after plugging in my Stereographics Enabler
between the VGA out of the mac graphics card and the monitor cable,
and hooking up the Stereographics E2 emitter box to that
(stolen off my linux box which uses a quadro XGL 980. I had to plug
the enabler PS2 power supply cable in to an adjacent SGI indigo2
keyboard port, how ironic!)
when I turned on the plugin to use quad buffered stereo (force blue
line checked), the emitter box light up,
and yes, there was a quad buffered stereo image on the screen (an old
21 inch SGI CRT monitor)

I can get 1280x1024 at 90Hz (a bit flickery of course)
and
1280x960 at 96 Hz (flicker not too bad)
(and an unuseable but flicker free 1280x492 at 120 Hz)

Works with Pymol and Osirix!!! Maybe it will work with O, VMD and
others too....
(now I just need to fix our software www.BioImageXD.org
to make it work properly too....)

I thought I needed the special Mac version of the emitter box and
enabler from stereographics,
but apparently the normal windows/linux one works with this
GeForceFX5200 with blue line quad buffered stereo.

cheers go out to Jonathon Mah for inspiting me to try it!!!

Dan

Begin forwarded message:

> Begin forwarded message:
>
>> I'm Jonathon Mah, a student studying third year Computer Systems
>> Engineering at the University of Adelaide -- and also a Cocoa nut.
>> Over the (Australian) summer break I've been working at SAPAC
>> <http://www.sapac.edu.au/>. As you may remember, back in last
>> September/October Craig Hill contacted you about stereo support in
>> OsiriX. Specifically, quad-buffered stereo was desired.
>>
>> "Quad-buf... what?"
>> I had no idea what quad-buffered stereo was, either. Quad-buffered
>> is where you write the left and right images to the graphics card.
>> Since OpenGL uses a front buffer (on-screen) and back buffer (off-
>> screen), adding stereo to these gives you four buffers (front-left,
>> front-right, back-left, back-right). Thus, "quad-buffered". Once
>> the graphics card has the left and right images, it can display
>> them for shutter glasses, output them to different monitors, and so
>> on, depending on the card's driver.
>>
>> I was able to add support for this to OsiriX. VTK already provides
>> some support for this, but it doesn't work as-is. Since Objective-C
>> is so nicely dynamic, I was able to implement this as a plug-in
>> (although it should eventually be merged into the main app). I've
>> also added support for exporting stereo movies (left and right
>> separately). We've been using it for a couple of months now, so I
>> think the major problems have all been fixed. Stereo rendering
>> looks really very nice!
>>
>> You'll find the source and binary at <http://www.JonathonMah.com/
>> temp/QuadBufferedStereo.zip>. Please put it up on the OsiriX plug-
>> ins page. It'd be great if you could copy it to your own server, as
>> that address will only be temporary. There's a ReadMe file included
>> which should answer most questions. It compiles for Intel too, but
>> I don't have a machine here to test it on -- I assume it works. :)
>> The quad-buffered mode will show the left and right images
>> flickering back and forth, which is necessary for shutter glasses.
>> I also put an interlaced option in there, "because I can".

Dr. Daniel James White BSc. (Hons.) PhD
Bioimaging Coordinator
Nanoscience Centre and Department of Biological and Environmental
Sciences
Division of Molecular Recognition
Ambiotica C242
PO Box 35
University of Jyväskylä
Jyväskylä
FIN 40014
Finland

+358 14 260 4183 (work)
+358 468102840 (mobile)
http://www.bioimagexd.org
http://www.chalkie.org.uk
dan_at_chalkie.org.uk
white_at_cc.jyu.fi