Building a Geowall

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A GeoWall is a large stereoscopic display, supporting immersive 3D interaction. We are in the process of building two GeoWalls to support our project in computer-aided exercise. Our two walls will each be 8'x6' in size, and will support a stereo display at 1024x768 resolution.

The basic hardware requirements are two data projectors with polarizing filters, a silver surface to project on, and a PC with a graphics card supporting stereo output. Users require polarizing glasses to view the display in 3D.

OGRE and Stereo Output

There are effectively two ways of producing stereo output from an OGRE application. These are described on the OGRE forum:

  • In hardware: NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards offer 3D stereo drivers that automatically produce stereo versions of DirectX and OpenGL applications. NVIDIA provides a technical brief. We have not tried this approach, but it is reported to work well with OGRE; not a lot of information is available about the use of these drivers with polarization.
  • In software: the basic approach is to render two windows side by side, each corresponding to the view of one eye. The windows should be sized so that each is projected onto a different projector when the desktop spans over the two projectors' displays. The views are created with two cameras. Each camera's frustum must be offset so the two views properly align.
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