Software issues for PC-based stereoscopic displays: how to make PC users see stereo

The PC, as the dominant computer platform, is the most exciting market for stereoscopic displays and applications. Several low-cost stereoscopic display systems have been introduced for PCs, including liquid-crystal shutter (LCS) glasses, low-resolution head-mounted displays (HMDs), and polarized displays with passive polarized glasses. However, each stereoscopic system has its own proprietary driver, and few drivers support Windows. LCDBios, a DOS driver developed by Donald Sawdai, solved the difficult timing problem of accurately synchronizing LCS glasses to the monitor's refresh without degrading computer system performance. More important, LCDBios also provided the stereoscopic industry with a defacto standard API for displaying stereoscopic images with any LCS glasses. However, the LCDBios API only supported LCS glasses for DOS applications without hardware graphics acceleration. The Stereoscopic Device Interface (SSDI), developed by the authors, now provides a standard architecture and API for driving any stereoscopic display system under DOS and Windows while taking advantage of hardware graphics acceleration. The SSDI architecture consists of the SSDI core, SSDI rendering platform drivers, and SSDI device drivers specific to the stereoscopic hardware. The SSDI architecture is broad enough to support device driver modules for all current stereoscopic hardware, including extensions for head-tracking. SSDI currently runs under Windows 95/98 and DOS, while Windows NT support is under development.