Experience with stereoscopic display devices and output algorithms

Abstract

Unobtrusiveness seems much more important than price or image quality to high-end workstation stereo users. Polarizing plate technology freed our users to concentrate better on their application. Unobtrusiveness seems to he important in the marketplace too, since the polarizing plate is selling well despite a price 2-3 times that of similar active glasses installations. These observations come from watching chemists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as they used molecular computer graphics with many stereo display devices. The output algorithm of rotation to produce stereo is well known to be wrong for the perspective case, but correct for the non-perspective (orthographic) case. However, a shear is better for orthographic stereo, because it correctly handles clipping planes on some graphics hardware, and it is faster to compute than a rotation. A shear creates the illusion that transformations order is reversed. © 1989 SPIE.