Stereo

The camera mode refers to any of several stereo and mono viewing options. The camera mode of the Chimera graphics window can be controlled with the command stereo, the Camera tool, or the menu raised by double-clicking the eye position in the Side View. The Image camera mode (used for saving image files) can differ from the mode shown in the graphics window.

Available camera modes:

• mono - standard single view
  
  
• stereo left eye - single view from the left-eye position
  
  
• stereo right eye - single view from the right-eye position
  
  
• cross-eye stereo - side-by-side views, with the left-eye view on the right and the right-eye view on the left
  
  
• wall-eye stereo - side-by-side views, with the left-eye view on the left and the right-eye view on the right
  
  
• red-cyan (anaglyph) stereo - superimposed left-eye and right-eye views in different colors. Glasses with colored filters (such as used to view 3D movies) are needed to produce a three-dimensional effect. The red channel is used for the left-eye view, green and blue for the right-eye view. This setting works best with red-cyan glasses, but reasonably well with red-blue or red-green glasses. Some ghosting will always be present unless the glasses are perfectly matched to the frequencies of light emitted by the display. Stereo cues will be greater when colors with a balance of red and blue/green components are used, for example, grayscale, magenta, and yellow rather than red, green, blue, or cyan. The red, green, and blue component values of a color can be viewed by entering its name in the Color Editor.
  
  
• sequential stereo - rapid flickering between left-eye and right-eye views; special synchronized glasses are needed to produce a three-dimensional effect. Sequential stereo mode can be specified at startup with --stereo. This mode is only available on certain systems:

  • Sequential stereo is only supported on workstation-class graphics cards with graphics drivers configured for stereo (e.g., ATI FireGL/FirePro and NVidia Quadro graphics cards for Windows and Linux, NVidia Quadro for Mac OS X).

  • For sequential stereo on Macs, the Aqua version of Chimera may be preferred over the X Windows (X11) version. The latter requires enabling X11 for stereo by entering the following in a Terminal window:

    defaults write com.apple.x11 enable_stereo -bool true

    X11 must be restarted after this setting is changed. The setting is saved in the ~/Library/Preferences directory and will apply to future sessions.

  Some devices reverse the eye views in sequential stereo, necessitating use of the startup option --reverse-stereo or the corresponding setting in the Camera tool.
  
  
• row interleaved stereo - with left- and right-eye views in alternating rows, as used by 3D displays from Miracube, Zalman, and others
  
  
• DTI side-by-side stereo - for stereo viewing with DTI technology