The FireDance CD features 23 computer rendered animations with sound
and music. All animations are excellent. They usually tell a little story
and are highly entertaining. The stereo-effects are great. Sound and music
are done professionally. FireDance will become my new reference software
to show friends and family what Stereo3D is all about.
Using shutterglasses there are a few problems though.
1) First of all despite the fact that the animation player is a windows
program, the animations itself run in standard VGA. I don't know of any
utilities to change the refresh rate of such a mode on any VGA-card. This
mode is stuck at about 70 Hz on almost all cards. Flicker can't be eliminated.
2) All animations use large parallaxes and some of them in high contrast,
resulting in ghosting.
3) There are lots of objects coming way out of the screen, which is
really great sometimes, but many of them clash with the left or right border
of the screen. This looks odd and destroys the 3D-effect in this area.
All these problems vanish if the animations are viewed in the way they
were made for - with a stereo capable HMD, such as i-glasses,
VFX, CyberMaxx or others. This stuff is the the best I saw so far on my
CyberMaxx. Actually I fell in love with my CyberMaxx for the first time.
For LCD-shutterglasses users this CD is highly recommended, for owners
of a HMD it is a must-have.
Firedance is available from Tetratel
Corp. for $29.95.
Hardware Compatibility:
As I said before the animations are done in standard VGA, using line-sequential
stereo-format. The animation files have a *.ves extension and seem to be
a proprietary format for the Protologic player. They do not work with a
standard player on the windows desktop. The files will play on HMDs - i-glasses,
VFX, CMaxx, etc. - and for shutterglasses with "line-blanking", such as
EyeFX and VR-Joy. The H3D has a line-blanker too, but it won't work with
such a gem, like FireDance, because the H3D people give a damn about 3rd
party software.
Compatibility with other shutterglasses depends on your 3D-driver-software
and your skill to get the lo-res standard VGA mode into interlace or page-flipping
format under Windows, which should be quite hard.
Content of FireDance:
Mythology series
Minotaur.Ve Theseus and the Minotaur
Icarus.Ve Dædelus and Icarus
Egypt.Ve Egyptomania
Space series
Space.Ve The Boreallian Nebula:
"The last A-Planet class 5 defence outpost"
NASA.Ve The Navigator probe: In homage to the people of NASA
Invader.Ve Toyaliens: Earth Invasion
Famous Cities series
Volcano.Ve Herculaneum: the forgotten city
Maya.Ve Mayan City: Raider of Lost Treasures
Dodge.Ve Dodge City Tornado
St_Paul.Ve London's St. Paul Cathedral
GoldGate.Ve San Francisco's Golden Gate airshow
Firework.Ve Washington DC 4th of JulyFireworks at Capitol Hill
Ritual series
FireDanc.Ve Stonehenge's fire dance
WingsWar.Ve Wings of war
Aperture.Ve Apperture: Biomechanical metamorphsIn homage to Philip
K. Dick
Painting series
Fly.Ve A fly hunts and the perpetual illusion of time measured by melting
clocksIn homage to Salvador Dali
Faint.Ve And Life let out an agonizing scream...In homage to Edvard
Munch
Bric-à-brac series
Shark.Ve Shark Attack
Pool.Ve Q-ball
Chess.Ve Chessanation
Gothic.Ve Gothic
Music series
Bethoven.Ve Life's SymphonyIn hommage to Ludwig Von Beethoven"Music:
Discovery, passion and poetry; Music for combustion; Autumn Cantata; Beethoven
ascending"
Imprompt.Ve Impromptus: A rock on a roll