In the post Flightgear with quad buffered stereo I have written about how to get quad buffered stereo to work with the famous flight simulator FlightGear.  Recently FlightGear-2.4.0 has been released. The problem with quad buffered stereo still persists with FlightGear-2.4.0 .

One expects to enable stereoscopic mode in FlightGear starting it with the following line:

export OSG_STEREO_MODE=QUAD_BUFFER;export OSG_STEREO=ON; fgfs

When starting flightgear this way, one gets the following console output and no stereoscopic view:

Warning: detected OpenGL error ‘invalid operation’ after RenderBin::draw(,)

Getting FlightGear to work with quad-buffered stereo

The reason for the above error message and the resulting broken stereo mode is, that the stereo context does not get initialized properly.  The details are described here: Flightgear with quad buffered stereo. However, the  good news is, that the patch I proposed in the mentioned post, still works with FlightGear-2.4.0. You can download the patch from here: [download#43]

As usual for quad buffered stereo, you have to use a professional graphics board that supports quad buffered stereo, like a NVIDIA Quadro FX or a Ati FireGL and proper display hardware, like shutter glasses, a HMD or a stereoscopic projection system, to benefit from it. To use the quad buffered stereo mode start flightgear with the environment variables mentioned above. Afterwards you probably have to enable quad buffered stereo mode by selecting the Stereoscopic View Options Item in the the View menu.

With the previous version, when using the quad buffered stereo mode in flightgear, there occurred some graphics errors. Some cockpit controls and other scene details contained yellow lines, like a wireframe, which were not there when starting FlightGear in “normal” display mode. These problems seem to be gone with Flightgear-2.4.0. At least I did not notice them  anymore.

The Gentoo way

For gentoo users I have created an overlay. Like the previous one it contains patches and modified ebuilds for flightgear with working quad buffer support.  You may get the overlay from here: [download#72] Download the overlay and extract it in /usr/local/portage. Be sure to include the following line in your /etc/make.conf:

PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/portage”

Then emerge flightgear and enjoy it in three dimensions.

Have fun

Jürgen

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Posted in 3d, gentoo, graphics, linux | No Comments »

Yesterday the new mplayer-1.0_rc4_p20110322 ebuild appeared in portage.  In the post stereoscopic mplayer working again part 2 I provided a modified patch for stereoscopic support in mplayer-1.0_rc4_p20101114. This patch still works with the current version.  To use it, just download the patch from there and copy it to:

/etc/portage/patches/media-video/mplayer-1.0_rc4_p20110322-r1/

afterwards emerge mplayer and play stereoscopic movies with

mplayer -vo gl2:stereo some_movie_file.avi

mithrandir

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Posted in 3d, linux, multimedia | 1 Comment »

Recently I wrote about bino, a stereoscopic video player that is usable with linux and also supports quad buffered stereo. In the meanwhile the first stable version 1.0 has been released. Its main features are:

• Support for 2D and stereoscopic 3D video in a wide variety of input formats and stereo layouts.
• Support for many 3D output methods, including anaglyph glasses, shutter glasses, autostereoscopic displays, 3D TV sets, and distributed multi-display installations such as powerwalls or Virtual Reality installations.

The Gentoo way

For gentoo users here is my overlay including the ebuild: [download#68] Download the overlay and extract it in /usr/local/portage. Be sure to include the following line in your /etc/make.conf:

PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/portage”

Then emerge bino and enjoy viewing your 3d movies.

Jürgen

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Posted in 3d, gentoo, linux, multimedia | 1 Comment »

MPO stereo images, that were taken in example using Fujifilm FinePix Real 3D Cameras contain a field parallax in their exif data. The parallax value can be used by stereoscopic viewers like my stereoscopic image viewer SIV to adjust the 3D effect. By manipulating this value one can can customize the strength of the pop out effect and reduce the ghosting effect. This may lead to a more pleasuring viewing experience.

The parallax value can easily be displayed using exiftool:

exiftool -ee -Parallax DSCF0045.MPO

If you want to set the parallax value of an image, this is not that easy, since the value is stored in the exif data of the second embedded jpeg file in the MPO, which is not directly writable with exiftool. However one can find out the beginning of the second file with exiftool, extract the image and then set the parallax value. Afterwards on can put all together again using dd. Doing this manually is a quite awful task, so I wrote a little script for automating it:

#!/bin/bash
#setparallax.sh
#$1: MPO File $2: Parallax value

MPSTART=`exiftool -b -MPImageStart $1`
echo Multipart Image 2 begins at: $MPSTART
let MPSTART=$MPSTART/64
cp -a $1 $1.orig
exiftool $1.orig -mpimage2 -b | exiftool  -b -Parallax=$2 – \
| dd conv=notrunc bs=64 seek=$MPSTART of=$1

Use it at the command line as follows:

setparallax.sh [MPO-File] [new parallax value]

in example:

setparallax.sh DSCF0045.MPO 1.25

For determining the value that matches the visual requirements of your image you may use the parallax adjustment function of SIV (+/- key) and use the value on the OSD and printed out in the console. Perhaps some day I will add the functionality, to directly write the new parallax value to the MPO file, to SIV. However the setparallax script at least gives us the possibility to write the parallax value until then.

Jürgen

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Posted in 3d, graphics, linux, tools | 3 Comments »

The current OpenSceneGraph ebuild in the Gentoo Portage tree does not install the OpenSceneGraph sample data set.  These  files include some sample models, fonts, bitmaps etc. used in the OpenSceneGraph examples and other applications.  This is a problem for applications relying on the files to be available. In example my stereoscopic image viewer SIV relies on having the OpenSceneGraph sample dataset installed and fails to load the arial font from the dataset with the following error:

Warning: font file “fonts/arial.ttf” not found.

Here is my modified ebuild resolving this issue: [download#63]

Download the modified ebuild and extract the archive into /usr/local/portage. Be sure to include the following line in your /etc/make.conf:

PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/portage”

If you want to use OpenSceneGraph with ffmpeg support, download the patch from bugs.gentoo.org and copy it to /etc/portage/patches/dev-games/openscenegraph-2.8.3/ as described there, to compile with ffmpeg-0.6. Otherwise the emerge will fail with:

/osgPlugins/ffmpeg/FFmpegAudioStream.hpp:18:9:
error: cannot allocate an object of abstract type
‘osgFFmpeg::FFmpegAudioStream’

Now you can set the examples USE-Flag and emerge openscenegraph to get the example dataset.

If you have got flightgear installed, reinstall simgear afterwards,  like the ebuild requests you to do:

emerge -1 dev-games/simgear

Depending on if you were upgrading or just reinstalling with the new ebuild it may be necessary to run revdep-rebuild to resolve issues with broken libraries. Hopefully the next ebuild in the portage tree will  include the sample data set.

Wxwidgets support seems to be broken with the current version. When using the wxwidgets USE-Flag Openscenegraph fails to compile with, so include

=dev-games/openscenegraph-3.0.1 -wxwidgets

in your /etc/portage/package.use if you have enabled wxwidgets in your make.conf.

best regards

Jürgen

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Posted in 3d, graphics, linux, multimedia, programming | No Comments »

Recently I basically got Flightgear to work with quad buffered stereo. The only thing that was still missing for having the Vusix VR920 head mounted display fully supported in the flight simulator was headtracking.

However, with my new headtracking driver, VR920 headtracking in Flightgear is possible at last. A good part of the work has been done by Anders Gidenstam who provided the original Nasal module, the headtracking protocol description and usage instructions for his webcam based headtracking solution for Flightgear.

Download and copy the protocol description [download#59] to $FG_ROOT/Protocol. For me (gentoo system) this location is /usr/share/games/FlightGear/Protocol/, probably for many others it is /usr/share/FlightGear/Protocol/

Afterwards download unzip the modified Nasal module [download#58] to ~/.fgfs/Nasal. It is important to use your home directory and NOT i.e. /usr/share/games/FlightGear/Nasal/.

Then make sure that the vr920 headtracking driver runs in UDP mode. If running Flightgear on the same machine as the headtracking driver, which should be the usual case, just use 127.0.0.1 as destionation IP for the driver and use 4242 as destination port. These are the default settings of the driver.

Finally run Flightgear with these options: –generic=socket,in,<hz>,,<port>,udp,headtrack –prop:/sim/headtracking/enabled=1

If you also want to have quad buffered stereo with it (you need an nvidia quadro board, with assumably a pre G80 Chip or probably an ATI FireGL, never tried that, and a stereo enabled xserver) use the patch from FlightGear with quad buffered stereo. For instructions on how to get the xserver to work in stereoscopic mode see: Vuzix VR920 with Linux and active 3D stereo

For the described configuration you can use the following little startup script:

export OSG_STEREO_MODE=QUAD_BUFFER
export OSG_STEREO=ON
fgfs –generic=socket,in,25,,4242,udp,headtrack –prop:/sim/headtracking/enabled=1

Now have much fun and enjoy a new experience with your VR920 and Flightgear in stereo with headtracking.

best regards

Jürgen

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Posted in 3d, drivers, games, gentoo, linux, networking | No Comments »

Recently I wrote about bino, a stereoscopic video player that is usable with linux and also supports quad buffered stereo. In the meanwhile the versions 0.9.1 and 0.9.2 have been released. The new version includes multithreading to read, decode, and display video data in parallel, for better performance and some bugfixes.

Bino still does not work properly with linux, at least it still does not display anything on my gentoo box. The patch for bino, I provided here, does not work anymore.

Problems

At least on my gentoo box bino failed to display anything. When starting bino  it failed with a window popping up:

Cannot set GL context format

The reason for this was the same as before. Bino was requesting an alpha visual, which did not succeed. I have not seen the point in requiring an alpha visual for bino, so I just removed this. You may download the patch from here: [download#60]

Addon: The patch is only necessary when the X server does not provide an alpha visual, which may i.e. be the case when using only 16 bits of colour  depth.

Getting things to work

Download Bino from here: bino-0.9.2.tar.xy and extract it.

tar -xf bino-0.9.2.tar.xz

Afterwards apply my patches and compile Bino.

cd bino-0.9.2

patch -p0 < bino-0.9.2-quad-buffered-stereo.patch

./configure

make

make install

The Gentoo way

For gentoo users here is my overlay including the ebuild: [download#62] Download the modified overlay (it includes the patches) and extract it in /usr/local/portage. Be sure to include the following line in your /etc/make.conf:

PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/portage”

Then emerge bino and enjoy viewing your 3d movies again.

Jürgen

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Posted in 3d, gentoo, linux, multimedia | 1 Comment »