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Firefox and NVIDIA bring stereoscopic 3D to YouTube

by Hugo Jobling on 27 May 2011, 10:33

Tags: NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), YouTube (NASDAQ:GOOG)

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3D Web

YouTube's 3D mode has been extended to add a new mode of display, with the addition of support for NVIDIA's 3D vision - so far only in Firefox 4. The reason for the restriction to one browser is that the videos are using the WebM format - a video codec supported, among others, by Google and Mozilla, explaining their teaming up

Viewers with Firefox 4 and a 3D vision-capable NVIDIA graphics card will be able to select HTML 5 Stereo Mode on 3D videos on YouTube. Currently, doing so requires diving into a separate menu and back to the video of chosen, but as NVIDIA is offering a simple website which lets you check if your browser GPU can support stereoscopic YouTube it's likely auto-detection will be added once YouTube is happy there are no issues with this new 3D mode.

Without compatible hardware and software the old 3D options offered by YouTube - including interleaved, side-by-side and two-colour glasses modes - will still be available. The quality of these methods of displaying of 3D is a marked step down from stereoscopic, however.

Although the feature is currently only available in Firefox 4, Mozilla is keen for other browsers to follow it in supporting the new 3D mode. Chrome would be the most likely next candidate, as it also already supports the WebM format - Internet Explorer support is almost certainly off the cards, though.

 



HEXUS Forums :: 4 Comments

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Until we have desktop screens that don't need 3d glasses, I can't see this really taking off

Will be awesome when we do reach this point though
hopefully the red team are going to do something similar, although why youtube are working on a vendor specific solution rather than an open standard i don't know.
nVidia very keen to push a technology that has very little success in the last twelve months. Very few users, very little interest, very little interest after the intial ‘oooo’ factor from twelve months ago.

Gaming will make 3D more popular but at the moment I don't think there is enough interest from users or programmers.
I'd be interested to see if this works (eventually) with 3D enabled televisions. We have televisions that are internet-ready, most with Youtube integrated and we have televisions with 3D technology. Why not combine the two?

The problem with Nvidia's tech is that there are still only about 20 screens (plus TVs and projectors) that support the fast refresh rates needed - and they're mostly expensive. Not to mention not many games are specifically designed to work in 3D, so you end up like most movies - a bit of depth, but no set pieces or gameplay that exploits it.