Second Life Displays in 3D with New 3rd Party Viewer!

I hope you kept your 3D glasses from the last big dumb Hollywood movie you saw, because you'll want to put them on when you watch this machinima that showcases the latest innovation in open source Second Life viewers:

That's right: This is Second Life displayed in 3D. It's an effect that's been done before, but now you can try it out for yourself: Go here to get the 3D viewer from KirstenLee Cinquetti, version S21 of Ms. Cinquetti's popular and innovative open source third party Second Life viewer. As with previous versions, you'll need a powerful system to run it. But hey, Kirsten heard you liked 3D, so she put 3D in your 3D so you can be in 3D while you're in 3D.

"A couple of weeks back the Machinima Monday crew invited me to do a Q&A session," as Kirsten tells me. "[O]ne of the questions took the form of a very heartfelt plea for some 3D, so I said I will see what I can do!"

And so she has: "Basically," KirstenLee explains, "[I] looked at several code examples (including previous examples), none of which would work with the current viewer, then set about creating something that would. The result is a fairly decent full colour red/cyan anaglyph mode (it's not perfect ) but it's good enough."

But how does she do it? Here's the full geek exegesis after the break:

"To get really technical, the camera code changed to use a frustum camera from many OpenGL examples, does the essential math, distance near and far etc. Then exactly like the original University of Michigan code rotations, about a set point in space are applied for left and right eyes in this case it produces an off-axis view. Then I modified the display code to render alternate frames, taking into account not to render the UI twice for each frame etc. Then I wrote some routines to allow me to tell different parts of the rendering code what type of color mask to use dependant on each frame. Everything is combined and Bingo! you have 3D.

"This of course is an over-simplification," Ms. Cinquetti allows, "as the rendering of Second Life has got vastly more complex than a few years ago. Masses of time spent in trail and error testing." Speaking of which, if you do try Kirsten's 3D viewer for a 3D world, I hope you share your experiences in Comments.

Comments

[ColeMarie Soleil]

YEAH KIRSTEN! ^^

[Adeon Writer]

I don't have glasses, but I'm ordering some good plastic ones. (I'm morally against wearing my niece's Miley Cyrus 3D paper glasses.)

[Ehrman Digfoot]

An "over-simplification"! Oh for goodness sake! Why doesn't she work for LL?!?!

[Ann Otoole InSL]

Too bad it doesn't work with the sort of glasses you get at the movie theater (Real3D). I never see those red/green type glasses anymore. Oh well.

[Eggy Lippmann]

Now do 3D graphics HTML5 in 3D anaglyph inside 3D Second Life, using the parcel media stream ;)

[Mondy]

Forget the 3D glasses from the movies.
You need the old style red/green type.

[Adeon Writer]

Those Real3D glasses are circular polarized lenses. Unless you have a special polarized monitor made for them (that probably dosn't exist), they're if no use at home.