True stereoscopic quad buffering in XNA

Question

We are trying to make 3D stereoscopy work within XNA for Windows PC Games using NVidia 3D Vision, we really have no idea how this would be achieved and are just now skimming through the XNA documentation, while we found some examples for anaglyph 3D, we were wondering if there was any way to make it work with the Active glasses that NVidia bundles with its 3D Vision package.

We would also love to hear any alternatives as to how we could make this work on Xbox360, without the glasses of course.

Thanks in advance :3

Answer 1

To enable quad-buffering, in XNA 3.1, what you are looking for is (MSDN):

PresentationParameters.BackBufferCount = 3;

You will also want to have VSync turned on.

You may find you need to either not use the Game class or use it "unusually". If you find yourself having to write your own draw loop, the function you want is GraphicsDevice.Present.

Now the bad news is that according to the XNA 4.0 documentation for PresentationParameters, that feature has been moved or removed. But 4.0 is still in beta, so the API and documentation are not final yet.

Answer 2

I managed to find a handly little CodePlex project after browsing the XNA forums, I'm not sure exactly how it works (The details are in Spanish) but here is what the translation works out as:

Curious example you will learn how to play your games immerse the user beyond a 2D screen, there are several techniques to achieve this but this is based on the use of spectacles in which the left eye has a red lens and right eye a blue or green lens.

I hope it's of some use to you anyway even if it's not really suited to your needs.

3D Projection in XNA

Answer 3

Stereo feature is easy to set up in XNA app fullscreen mode. However, as it is quite new, there are some limits eg no windows form components. WPF is much more powerful tool but I don't know how to set it up for 3D vision yet.