Visualization using 3D Monitor

• Main Author: Hagdahl, Stefan
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Blekinge Tekniska Högskola, Avdelningen för för interaktion och systemdesign 2008
• Subjects: Direct3D; DirectX; Spatial View; 3D Display System; rendering; Geometry Instancing; Computer Sciences; Datavetenskap (datalogi)
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:bth-5321

Many companies over the years have been working with enhancing the visual effect of monitors and television with 3D glasses and such. There is a new form of 3D viewing right now; Spatial View is the one I know most about. Their technology includes a barrier panel technology which aligns the right and left eye simultaneously giving the person looking at the monitor a 3D viewing. Spatial View has developed an API that can be easily included in games and rendering applications to enable this 3D visualization and this thesis is about the computer performance cost. The API works in such a way that it takes 5 images of the current scene the camera is looking at in the game or rendering application and interlace them together to produce 1 image to be displayed on screen. Combining this with the monitor technique gives the visual effect. The 5 different camera angles that are produced can be a strain on the performance, meaning that the rendering API in this case Direct3D 9.0c has to render everything 5 times each frame. This can slow down the frame rate of the game, which is very important for the game to run smoothly. This thesis main focus is to understand the correlation between the number of camera angles and rendering time for Direct3D 9.0c, is it linear or exponential. By having access to Spatial View’s Direct3D 9.0c API, I was able to construct a test application which could answer the hypothesis. Six tests were used to investigate this with different numbers of camera angle to see the impact on rendering time. Using one, two and five camera angles for the test with large cubes (big enough to almost cover the screen) and small cubes (almost small enough to not see). After seeing the rendering time and understanding the API from Spatial View’s, a theory about reducing the rendering time arose. This theory will be explained throughout the thesis and discussed; it includes using Direct3D 10.0 with geometry instancing.