History of "Multimedia" (Was:iMac AddOn (was:Future Collect

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Wed Nov 11 09:03:52 1998

At 07:38 PM 11/10/98 +0000, Tony Duell wrote:
>
>To get on-topic (I hope)... There were attempts at making 3D displays
>using LCD spectacles controlled by the vertical sync signal to the
>monitor. You saw one frame though each eye. It worked well, apart from
>the flicker (even at about 100 frames/second).
>
>Anybody have one of those in their collection?

Yes, I've got one for the Amiga, and it probably falls under the ten-year
rule by now. LCD shutter, big like soft plastic goggles, connected
to the spare game port. It shipped with some sort of "space potato" meteor
battle shoot-em-up, and I recall a few 3D rendering packages at the time
could make images for it, which were Amiga interlaced bitmaps that had to
be viewed with a special viewer to generate the magic sync.

At 04:41 PM 11/10/98 -0600, Doug Yowza wrote:
>But I don't think those are 10 years old yet. Weren't there older
>displays that simply presented different images to the left and right side
>of the CRT, and you looked into the view finder. Or am I thinking of the
>GAF ViewMaster?

As recently as four-five years ago, a company (Simsalabim?) was selling
a monitor hood like this at Siggraph, and software to split-render a
3D Studio scene. This year, I saw a company selling a monitor with
a lenticular lens cover, giving postcard-style 3D without goggles.

- John
Received on Wed Nov 11 1998 - 09:03:52 GMT