Stereovision

The concept of stereoscopic imaging has been around for more than a century. Viewing the same or similar images from different perspectives, mixed up with some fancy optical equipment, and you get a neat looking 3D image. It was not until recently, however, that 3D Stereovision applications really started to take off. Perhaps the most well known application of this 3D technology is at Disneyland’s “Honey I Shrunk the Audience”. This short film subjects the audience to the perils of being tiny, complete with vermin and really scary snakes that “pop out of the screen”.

It is this effect that best characterizes the advantages of stereovision: instead of an image looking flat on the display, it can actually appear to protrude from the surface and be viewed in 3 dimensions. The applications of this technology are spread far and wide across all sorts of industries. From medical imaging, to photogrammetry, from entertainment to computer gaming, the technology of stereovision can be tremendously beneficial to all sorts of people. Indeed, the Z800 3DVisor is fairly well suited for use in all types of computing rather than gaming and gaming alone. However, this being a hardware review site centered around gaming, we will only be touching on the gaming side of stereovision.

Stereovision itself is essentially a play on the way the human optical system interprets objects. Each eye can see a different view of any given image, and by literally offsetting one of these images, the object will appear in 3D. Because the Z800 3DVisor has two OLED displays, it is particularly apt at accomplishing this effect. From a hardware standpoint, stereovision can be extremely taxing on a computer. For instance, take this quick comparison between stereovision and non-stereovision that we ran before playing F.E.A.R:


What stereovision offers for gamers is a sense of depth that cannot even come close be attained by any other means. We were able to successfully use the 3DVisor and stereovision with the following games:

• F.E.A.R
• Counter-Strike: Source
• Counter-Strike 1.6
• Call of Duty 2
• Oblivion
• Quake 4