Re: How to test stereoscopic 3D

Hi Carlos,

Active glasses sequentially block one eye and then the other, so there's no cross-talk between the eyes, but because they are flickering in front of your eyes all the time, they have a reputation of quickly fatiguing the eyes. Because a passive monitor has both images on-screen at all times, but the polarized glasses only allow each eye to see one of the images, it's not quite so wearying.

Oddly, the monitor that is most forgiving may not be a good one for QC (for example anaglyphic is very forgiving, and thus will fool you into thinking your images are aligned, when they're really not). So it's important that you have a monitor which really shows you, when your convergence is wrong. And you have to make sure you're looking at it from the right angle; the least forgiving one (usually straight on).

I own a Viewsonic 23" passive 3D monitor, that cost about $250. It's good for alignment, but it's probably not the best test of how the depth will look on a big screen. That's just because the big screen size and distance from the screen all factor into how the depth will look. For final finishing, you'll probably want to rent or buy a monitor or projection system that matches your final target screen, as closely as possible. But a smaller monitor will at least get you in the ball park.