Stereo Support

Stereo Support was added to AVS/Express in V3.1 and is accessible via a "Stereo" option on the View Editor page. In AVS/Express V5.1, stereo support was added for the HP and Windows platforms. The stereo button is active for the following supported platforms and framebuffers:

Silicon Graphics (SGI) platforms using the OpenGL renderer and running IRIX 5.3 or 6.x
Sun Microsystems (Sun) platforms using the XGL renderer on ZX, TZX or Creator 3D framebuffers and running Solaris 2.5 or later
Windows platforms
Hewlett Packard (HP) 10.20

For SGI platforms on which stereo drawing in the view window is not available, on/off toggles are provided on the stereo sub-editor page to control stereo and full screen video mode.

The OpenGL renderer will attempt to find and use a GLX_STEREO visual for quad-buffered support. If this is not available, and the "SGIFullScreenStereo" X extension can be found (xdpyinfo will show this) and created, switching the full screen button ON will cause a window occupying the entire screen to appear. You can press Shift-MB1 to switch this mode OFF.

If the device is capable of rendering a stereo image directly within the view window, setting the stereo button ON will automatically switch the video mode to correctly render the image and the full screen button will be inactive.

You can control the video commands used to switch the monitor into stereo mode by setting the environment variables "AVS_STEREO_ON_CMD" and "AVS_STEREO_OFF_CMD" appropriately. Both variables must be specified in to take effect.

Two slider controls, Distance and Separation Angle, on the stereo sub-editor page control how the stereo image is rendered. They control the left and right eye viewing projection and X-axis translation using the formula:

shift = (distance - 1.0) * (angle / distance);

The default settings are 2.0 for the Distance and 2.5 (degrees) for the Separation Angle. These two controls are fully implemented on the SGI platform; Sun systems support only the Separation Angle.

On the HP platform, to set up the monitor, run /opt/graphics/common/bin/setmon. Select one of the entries that says "Stereo in a Window" (they may be numbers 4 and 5). If one doesn't work, you can always go back and try the other. Follow the directions, and setmon will log you out and restart the windows system.
Then run Express as above (don't go into PEX), and you should be able to get a stereo view.

On the Sun platforms, AVS/Express supports stereo using XGL. AVS has done nothing to ensure that stereo works on Sun using OpenGL. To that degree, we only support stereo for Sun using XGL.

See the AVS/Express V5.1 release notes for the explanation of Stereo support.