Full window stereo

Abstract

Visualisation is the bioinformaticist's most important tool for the study of macromolecules, and being able to see molecules in stereo is a crucial aspect. Stereo vision is based on the principle that each eye is presented with the best possible image of what it would have seen if the object was really there in 3D. The simplest approach to stereo vision is to display the right eye picture on the right half of the screen and the left eye picture on the left half while using a mirror system to ensure that each eye sees what it is supposed to see. More expensive workstations use hardware to alternately display the left and right eye pictures while synchronously blocking the transparency in the right or left lens of the special glasses worn by the user. We present here some simple software that uses inexpensive hardware, originally designed for the computer game industry, to make full screen stereo available on Linux-based PCs. The quality of the stereo vision is similar to the top-of-the-line graphics workstations that are capable of quad-buffering. This stereo option has been incorporated in the XII based version of WHAT IF (Vriend, G. J. Mol. Graphics 1990, 8, 52-56), but the stereo source code is freely available and can easily be incorporated in other visualization packages.