Using Stereoscopic Viewing

You can setup stereoscopic viewing which describes how we use both eyes, each with a slightly different perspective, to perceive depth in a physical environment.

Computer technology uses stereoscopic viewing to recreate the way we naturally see depth - stereoscopically. Stereoscopic viewing delivers the most realistic visual representation possible of complex digital models, giving engineers, architects and scientists the best possible understanding of three-dimensional information, and yielding levels of technical proficiency not available using a typical 3D view.

These images can be perceived by a user wearing special glasses which continuously transmit separate images to the left and right eyes, creating a view of computer or video-based objects that have depth, perspective and presence in three-dimensional space.

Before you begin:
  • For active or passive stereoscopic effects, you need a graphic board supporting OpenGL quad-buffered stereo.
  • For anaglyph rendering effects, only anaglyph glasses are needed. Regarding the scenario below, skip steps 1 to 6 which are relevant only for active or passive stereoscopic effects.
  • When stereoscopic or anaglyph rendering effects are activated, the speficication tree is hidden. It is displayed as soon as you exit stereoscopic viewing.
Related Topics
More About Stereoscopic Viewing

  1. Set up the appropriate hardware configuration.

  2. Set up the graphic adaptor configuration for stereoscopic display.

    This step depends on hardware and operating system configuration. Some systems require administrator privileges to change the graphic adaptor display mode. You are required to determine the height, width and frequency characteristics of the graphic interface.

    Important: Stereo activation can be found in the display properties (select the Properties contextual command in your desktop background). Depending on the graphic adaptor, you may need to have administrator privilege to access the stereo setting. The location of this setting varies depending on the graphic driver vendor. If it is not directly available in the vendor tab page, look for "advanced configuration" in the vendor tab page or in the "settings" tab page. In some cases, you may need to reboot the computer to activate the new mode.

  3. Start a session.

  4. Select Tools > Options... > General > Immersive Virtuality > Immersive Configuration.

  5. Select the Enables stereoscopic display option.

  6. Exit the session to save your settings, then restart.

  7. Load a model.



  8. Select View > Toolbars > Immersive Virtuality.



  9. Click the arrow to display the whole toolbar.



    For more information about the different anaglyph stereoscopic effects, see More About Stereoscopic Viewing.

  10. In the Immersive Virtuality toolbar, select the stereoscopic mode of your choice. In this scenario, Active or Passive Stereoscopic Effects is selected.

    Stereoscopic viewing is enabled and has the following impacts on the application window:

    • The view is switched to a perspective view.
    • The 2D mouse cursor is replaced by a 3D immersive cursor to avoid perception conflicts and keep the stereoscopic effect.
    • The Robot and the Compass are hidden.



    This immersive cursor is made of two concentric circles: a small one filled in black and a larger one with no fill color. The circles are displayed on each end user's eye (which is why you can see two pair of concentric circles in the picture above) and their depth is based on the depth of the object the cursor is snapped to.

    The distance between the two pairs of concentric circles is based on the inter-eye distance and the depth of the underlying object. For instance, when both pairs are merged into one, it means that the immersive cursor is snapped to an object located in the screen plane.

  11. Optional: For an optimized visualization, you can:

    • Press F3 to remove the specification tree.
    • Select Tools > Options... > General > Display > Navigation then deactivate the Preselect in geometry view option.

  12. Set the object of your choice in the screen plane by right-clicking it in the 3D window then selecting Reframe On.

    In the picture below, the object highlighted in blue has been set in the screen plane and is centered in the application window:



  13. Zoom out to view the whole scene.




    • Any objects located in front of the screen plane will have a smaller depth and thus, will have a 3D pop-out effect.
    • Any objects located behind the screen plane will have a larger depth.

  14. Move the immersive cursor over the objects.

    The immersive cursor is rendered using a furtive technique: when the cursor is moved, only the two circles are rendered and not the whole scene to enhance the rendering time. This is why the color of the cursor matches the one of the underlying object.

    As the distance between the two pairs of circle depends on the inter-eye distance, the look of the cursor varies according to the object you point at. In the pictures below, you can see that as we get closer to the center of the screen, the concentric circles get closer to each other:





  15. To exit stereoscopic viewing, select No Stereoscopic Effects.