Absolute State of This 3D | Nostalgia Nerd
since the dawn of video games we've been trying to make these experiences feel akin to real life it really began in 1973 with maze war created at the nasa ames research center on an imblackpds1 and since then we've been chasing the dream of experiencing virtual worlds from a first person perspective but the concept of virtual reality started way before that back in the 19th century when sir charles weedstone created a stereoscope allowing two images offset to be combined and appear in three dimensions so when the worlds of video games and stereoscopy combined in the 90s we encountered a multitude of machines designed to drop us directly into worlds from our dreams virtuality was arguably the leader of the pack but we also had consumer devices like nintendo's virtual boy and even promises of headsets for the atari jaguar and sega mega drive the problem was they were all pretty crap and the best you could expect was to walk away with a banging headache and severe motion sickness but this didn't kill the dream we still wanted more we still wanted to be inside the worlds we were experiencing and so the early naughties saw a stereopsis resurgence with devices like this the star trek extreme 3d system [Music] let's take a look [Music] but before we get into a 20 year old star trek game how about a bang up to date star trek game big thanks to star trek fleet command for sponsoring this video star trek fleet command is an ios and android experience that's free to download and you can get it using the link below this is an open world strategic mmo where you can choose your path quite literally choose your ship and even decide whether you're going to help the federation or act like a complete and utter arse i usually go for the latter all the usual suspects are there geordie riker data spock crusher look there's picard hello picard and you can use your crew to take out kardashians ferengi or anyone else who threatens your galaxy class starship if that's the ship you've chosen from your fleet be warned though it's quite addictive so star trek fleet command free to play on ios and android and by using the link below you not only support the channel but you'll get plonked directly into the star trek universe given that a venn diagram of star trek fans and computer fans is just a single circle it's no surprise that plonking ourselves firmly on the bridge of a starship was one of the experiences we craved the most it's actually a surprise it took this long developed by totally games and released in early 2002 through activision this was the pairing many fans had been waiting for retailing for 99.95 about 160 today this is one of the first bundles that the company x3d put out for their new glasses sorry she looks absolutely disgusted with picard appearing almost immediately after the release of bridge commander and whoa just look at this box it's absolutely wild we've got the enterprise e seemingly warping along we've got a vga adapter glasses and of course an included a copy of bridge commander images appear to be floating inside and in front of the screen hey this is going to be one hell of a trip man a box with flaps is one thing but a flap and holographic print that's a whole new level the latest technology the hottest gaming action put yourself on the bridge of the enterprise and look at the specs we only need windows 98 32 megs of ram and an 8 speed cd-rom and oh and an nvidia card to play the actual game in 3d all major cards incorporating the chipsets listed below um all the chipsets listed above okay everyone violence of course nothing inside the box is going to live up to the externals we've got that vga adapter game and driver discs a couple of basic leaflets and those funky 3d glasses oh yeah it doesn't seem overly impressive but according to will wheaton this is going to be incredible it's extreme 3d and it's like nothing you have ever seen before x3d is extreme three-dimensional viewing right on your computer screen the images are so real you'll feel like you can reach out and touch them and kylie bax was absolutely flabbergasted each eye sees a slightly different view the glasses take these images and show them to each eye one at a time up to 60 times per second then they're fused back as one deep three-dimensional image in our brain so now we can turn our normally two-dimensional computer screen into an amazing x3d viewing experience wow yeah wow you simply can't fake that kind of excitement or this even fashion shows featuring famous swimsuit models so first things first let's install bridge commander from the included cd-rom i'll be using my dell dimension 3100 pc for this test i actually bought this one myself back in 2004 and really i haven't done much to it other than install some more ram and a geforce graphics card alas even the 52-speed cd drive can't install this game fast enough though the sheer number of tiny mp3 files containing dialogue means we're going to be here a while [Music] sod this [Music] ah nice holiday 35 minutes later bridge commander is ready and it plays well it plays just like the franchise's 55th anniversary edition released on gog last year but obviously playing it on a genuine xp machine is much nicer especially at the crazy resolution of 1280 by 10 24. just look at that i'm so used to dos resolutions but using an xp machine and playing a post-millennium game just feels like current day honestly here's a game which puts you as the new captain of the uss dauntless another galaxy class starship with an entire crew at your fingertips and to help on your progress you even get picard right at your side well on your on your left right at your left side is on your left hand side ready to give advice when needed as you might imagine the game hit the spot gaining favorable reviews and earning numerous awards including the gamespot best sci-fi simulation game of the year fending off fierce competition such as i have no idea star wars the clone wars i guess so bridge commander is great you bark orders at your crew you travel to places you get into fights you get to stare directly at picard for as long as you want it's everything you might want from a bridge simulator but we're here for the full 3d experience which requires attaching these glasses to enter that third dimension of course it's not quite as simple as that first we need to get rid of this flat screen monstrosity and bring in a nice crt display oh giant beast something that would create the most immersive 3d experience how about this absolutely massive lacy 22 inch electron blue yep that certainly hits the spot okay next we need to plug this dongle in line between the video out and the monitor we then plug the glasses into this port which enables them to sync with the display it's worth noting that these glasses will also connect to other similar equipment such as the sega master system 3d glasses adapter then it's time to install the x3d software which gives us an idea of how this technology actually works here we get a test image of but it's a rock isn't it but if we look at the rock through the left shutter we get a slightly different image to the right you'll see that the blue icon changes from l to r to indicate this to do this the x 3d software essentially halves the vertical resolution it then displays the left image on the odd scan lines and be right on the even scan lines on each vertical refresh it switches between these syncing would be left and right shutters on your glasses and creating the illusion of 3d these shutters by the way are lcd so they move quickly of course to do this we sacrifice half our vertical resolution and really half of our frame rate but the effect is well it's kind of convincing but that's when looking at a static image which has been optimized exclusively for these 3d glasses this interlaced 3d technique is used for most desktop applications as it's the least demanding on the hardware but most 3d accelerated games rely on progressive page flipping this way you don't lose half your vertical resolution the screen just swaps rapidly between left and right images in their entirety that's why you need dedicated nvidia 3d hardware and a decent monitor capable of keeping up with a high refresh rate unfortunately the current gs i have installed is just too damn new for the drivers about five years too new so i'll need to swap it out for something a little less feisty i hoped this palette daytona geforce ii mx400 64 megabytes pci card would do the trick no videl just doesn't like it how about this fx 5200 pci card nope that doesn't work the stereo drivers don't mesh with it in the end i had to go back to a reaver tnt-2 m64 from 1999 armed with a whopping 32 megabytes of vram core you can imagine how compatibility issues like this were enough to limit the life and reach of this product so not quite the powerhouse of a card i was hoping for but it gets the job done and after driver installation allowed the little stereo tab to be activated in the advanced display settings from here you can tweak the nvidia 3d settings see a medical demo which looks like an utter mess to you but to a 3d glasses wearer shows a larger box with a smaller box floating in front of it apparently if you can't see this then you shouldn't be using the glasses at all and should get medical help then there's a demonstration which shows lots of flying graphics if i position the glasses over the camera lens you can see how rather than this mess rapidly flickering back and forth between two images it appears much more composed to each eye as each eye receives a different consistent image it's not a bad demonstration but nothing really pops out of the screen as promised you do get a feeling of depth going into the screen however you can also tweak the 3d separation levels and change a few other settings to get the most from your experience by the way if you had an ati 3d card or something else like an s3 card this won't work with the x3d it needs to be an nvidia card if you owned a rival card you'd need something like these e-dimensional glasses which are identical save for the fact that they believed other video card owners existed as well and incorporated drivers to that effect okay so star trek bridge commander in full glorious 2002 triple dimension make it so oh god that doesn't look promising it was at this point that it began to dawn on nostalgia nerd that demonstrating a piece of 3d hardware in a 2d video is probably not the greatest of ideas sure he could use lame words like wow depth realistic profound even outstanding but would these words really be able to convey the majestic glory of this immersive three-dimensional experience i mean i could use those words but it would be absolute tosh this is worse than the tng episode code of honor or the episode where beverly crusher gets by a sodding ghost it's absolutely ridiculous the theory of it is actually quite clever the nvidia drivers make use of the game's zed buffer calculations to work out what is near and what is far so you should get an accurate 3d representation but the reality is a bit different this title screen is as screwed up as it looks here even with the glasses on and that's because the drivers simply don't know how to handle this screen remember text in the game is it's gammy as hell look at the state of that that looks no better in 3d glasses in fact it looks worse and that's because the drivers just don't know what to do with it and although the main bulk of the bridge is kind of in 3d it's all a bit odd when people are talking on the view screen you can perceive depth there as well because the game engine is rendering those parts as 3d assets but in reality you'd expect the view screen to be in two dimensions in fact you quickly realize that the bridge of a starship probably isn't the best experience for 3d anyway nothing is really that far away from you and it doesn't make you feel like you're actually on the bridge more than staring at your monitor it's all a bit flat still at least when picard walks up to you you at least get a sense of his shining head being slightly closer to your face so that seems all worthwhile maybe he can be the next gi jane too soon for flip's sake great everyone violence blue screens aside there's also that god awful feeling of bees in your brain it's the same feeling you get from the stone arches on outrun whizzing past the flicker isn't terrible but you can just feel it gnawing away at your faculties it's uncomfortable i've got this monitor set to 85 hertz which is the recommended level and probably the highest achievable for most people with standard monitors back in the early 2000s here each of my eyes is receiving a whole image 42 times per second and anyone who has looked at a 60 hertz screen in their peripheral vision will know how flickery that is so you can imagine how it feels here the thing is companies like x3d were hoping this would be the future of game and media consumption they even sold these weird little taster discs to wean youngsters onto the concept these bizarre little games come with a freakish lopped off mini cd and a tiny pair of color filtered to 3d glasses absolute insanity these games rely on the old-school method of overlaying slightly different perspectives in slightly different colors the red image can't be seen through the red lens and the blue image can't be seen through the blue lens so your eyes are again receiving different images and you get a crappy 3d effect which in the 80s it would have been incredible but you know even by the early naughties not so much but these 3d glasses are an absolute joke i mean honestly just look at the size of it are you guys having an absolute laugh for glasses wearers you can't even fit them on and then for people who don't need glasses it's not much better look are you having a laugh the colors don't even line up with my eyes how is this supposed to work who who thought of this idea it's absolutely ridiculous tiny 3d glasses loads of absolute godswamp plus the games aren't much better either one refused to work and this crappy pac-man clone wouldn't even render in 3d in fact it even broke the extreme 3d drivers so that was worthwhile the hope was i think but users would buy these tiny discs or children would buy them catching the 3d bug and then would upgrade to the x3d extreme system these games can even be used with the x 3d glasses or extreme 3d upgrade as it says on the disk but it really is a train to disappointmentville with a stopover at migraine town but wait you're not limited to games you can use these specs for tv viewing through a win tv card or just for viewing video on your desktop or anything else if you really want to but unless you're watching a correctly formatted 3d video or image it's just horrible nonsense and sure there were some samples on the x3d website but really that's quite a limited amount of entertainment you're getting you see the problem is 2d standard video doesn't contain any depth information whatsoever there's no way for the drivers to work out which parts to extrude and which parts to repress the result is a horrible kind of 3d gloss drizzle over the entire image which does nothing to enhance your viewing experience quite the opposite companies like the a4 mentioned e-dimensional released very similar products and pushed hard on the aspect of trying to make your whole computer and media experience 3d they also included magic 3d drivers to work with other video card brands including ati which really is the bare minimum you'd hope from an off-the-shelf package but it's not enough to save the idea e-dimensional may not have had will wheaton helping them out but they did seem to penetrate the market better in fact in 2004 there were even rumors that e-dimensional were working closely with nintendo to incorporate this technology into the upcoming nintendo revolution console you and me of course know it as its final name the wii but thank god this was not the case and either the rumors were utter garbage or nintendo saw sense and realized that this technology would just have hindered or destroyed their sales dreams can you imagine if the wii had shipped with these glasses if rather than having the fantastically fun wii sports with motion controls we were treated to a sickening 3d roller coaster with glasses that constantly fall off your face that would have finished nintendo's console dreams and consigned them to the scrap pile with sega leaving sony and microsoft to battle it out because fancier drivers or not this is still exactly the same lcd shutter technology trying to interface with kit that for a lot of people just wasn't up to spec and let's not forget that this was an era where many households were moving away from crt screens to lcd where this technology just wouldn't work of course these glasses just didn't disappear in the 2010s the 3d craze came back with flat panel 3d tvs and their own glasses some of which relied on modified shutter technology and at one point there was even a dedicated 3d channel on sky tv but it wasn't until devices like the rift and vive where 3d really found its groove i would say it's a shame but really it's not the only people who are sorry to see the back of this technology are brands like panadol and tylenol and clearly that's for the best if you get a chance to pick up one of these kits for cheap for the love of god do not until next time i've been nostalgia nerd toodaloo [Music] hey [Music] you
2022-04-02 15:38
