The story
The principle made its public debut remarkably early. In 1922, the Teleview 3D system was installed in a single theater in New York City. Several short films and one feature-length film were shown by running left-eye and right-eye prints in a pair of interlocked projectors with their shutters operating out of phase. Each seat in the auditorium was equipped with a viewing device containing a rapidly rotating mechanical shutter synchronized with the projector shutters. The system worked, but the expense of the installation and the unwieldiness of the viewers, which had to be supported on adjustable stands, confined its use to this one engagement.
In recent decades, the availability of lightweight optoelectronic shutters has led to an updated revival of this display method. Liquid crystal shutter glasses were first invented by Stephen McAllister of Evans and Sutherland Computer Corporation in the mid-1970s. The prototype had the LCDs mounted to a small cardboard box using duct tape. The glasses were never commercialized due to ghosting, but E&S was a very early adopter of third-party glasses such as the StereoGraphics CrystalEyes in the mid-1980s.
Panasonic developed a 3D television that employed active-shutter technology in the late 1970s. They unveiled the television in 1981, while at the same time adapting the technology for use with the first stereoscopic video game, Sega's arcade game SubRoc-3D (1982).
In 1985, 3D VHD players became available in Japan from manufacturers such as Victor (JVC), National (Panasonic), and Sharp. Other units were available for field sequential VHS tapes including the Realeyes 3-D. A few kits were made available to watch field sequential DVDs. Sensio released their own format which was higher quality than the High Quality Field Sequential (HQFS) DVDs.
Games
The method of alternating frames can be used to render modern 3-D games into true 3D, although a similar method involving alternate fields has been used to give a 3D illusion on consoles as old as the Master System and Family Computer. Special software or hardware is used to generate two channels of images, offset from each other to create the stereoscopic effect. High frame rates (typically ~100fps) are required to produce seamless graphics, as the perceived frame rate will be half the actual rate (each eye sees only half the total number of frames). Again, LCD shutter glasses synchronized with the graphics chip complete the effect.
In 1982, Sega's arcade video game SubRoc-3D came with a special 3D eyepiece, which was a viewer with spinning discs to alternate left and right images to the player's eye from a single monitor. The game's active shutter 3-D system was developed by Sega with Matsushita (now Panasonic).
In 1984, Milton Bradley released the 3-D Imager, a primitive form of active shutter glasses that used a motorized rotating disc with transparencies as physical shutters, for the Vectrex. Although bulky and crude, they used the same basic principle of rapidly alternating imagery that modern active shutter glasses still use.
Nintendo released the Famicom 3D System for the Famicom in October 1987 in Japan, which was an LCD shutter headset, the first home video game electronic device to use LCD Active Shutter glasses. Sega released the SegaScope 3-D for the Master System Worldwide in November 1987. Only eight 3D compatible games were ever released.
Read the full text
In 1993, Pioneer released the LaserActive system which had a bay for various "PAC's" such as the Mega LD PAC and LD-ROM² PAC. The unit was 3D capable with the addition of the LaserActive 3-D goggles (GOL-1) and the adapter (ADP-1).
While the 3D hardware for these earlier video game systems is almost entirely in the hands of collectors it is still possible to play the games in 3D using emulators, for example, using a Sega Dreamcast with a Sega Master System emulator in conjunction with a CRT television and a 3D system like the one found in The Ultimate 3-D Collection.
In 1999–2000, a number of companies created stereoscopic LC shutter glasses kits for the Windows PCs which worked with application and games written for Direct3D and OpenGL 3D graphics APIs. These kits only worked with CRT computer displays and employed either VGA pass-through, VESA Stereo or proprietary interface for left–right synchronization.
The most prominent example was the ELSA Revelator glasses, which worked exclusively with Nvidia cards through a proprietary interface based on VESA Stereo. Nvidia later bought the technology and used it in its stereo driver for Windows.
The glasses kits came with driver software which intercepted API calls and effectively rendering the two views in sequence; this technique required twice the performance from the graphic card, so a high-end device was needed. Visual glitches were common, as many 3D game engines relied on 2-D effects which were rendered at the incorrect depth, causing disorientation for the viewer. Very few CRT displays were able to support a 120 Hz refresh rate at common gaming resolutions of the time, so high-end CRT display was required for a flicker-free image; and even with a capable CRT monitor, many users reported flickering and headaches.
These CRT kits were entirely incompatible with common LCD monitors which had low 60 Hz or 75 Hz refresh rates, unlike CRT displays that had a higher refresh rate at lower resolutions. Moreover, the display market swiftly shifted to LCD monitors and most display makers ceased production of CRT monitors in early 2000s, which meant that PC glasses kits shortly fell into disuse and were reduced to a very niche market, requiring a purchase of a used high-end, big diagonal CRT monitor.
SplitFish EyeFX 3-D was a stereoscopic 3D shutter glasses kit for the Sony PlayStation 2 released in 2005; it only supported standard-definition CRT TVs. The accessory included a pass-through cable for the PS2 gamepad; when activated, the attached accessory would issue a sequence of rapidly alternating left–right movement commands to the console, producing a kind of "wiggle stereoscopy" effect additionally aided by the wired LC shutter glasses which worked in sync with these movements. The kit arrived too late in the product cycle of the console when it was effectively replaced by the PlayStation 3, and only a few games were supported, so it was largely ignored by gamers.
The USB-based Nvidia 3D Vision kit released in 2008 supports CRT monitors capable of 100, 110, or 120 Hz refresh rates, as well as 120 Hz LCD monitors.
From Wikipedia’s article on XpanD 3D, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3