I had a chance friday to speak with the CEO of Real D, Joshua Greer, whose company acquired StereoGraphics back in February, hoping to get a good idea of how comitted the new company was to maintaining its support of the CAD and scientific markets.

Given the hardcore entertainment background of Joshua Greer and the other co-founder of Real D (Greer worked with James Cameron on the filmmaker’s Ghosts of the Abyss 3D film), I was concerned that the new company’s focus would be switching mostly in that direction.

But during our conversation, I came to realize that Greer is as passionate about the vibrance and reality a stereoscopic view of both entertainment and technical content, and that he was particularly proud of the company’s recent announcement that SolidWorks would be including support for the StereoGraphics products in the next version of its software.

If you thought stereoscopic 3D was dead or stagnant—for both CAD and the movies—guess again. This is just one of several recent stereo product announcements that I think portend a resurgence of this 150-year-old technology. I’ll tell you about the latest stereoscopic display system I saw at National Manufacturing Week later this week.

I’ve accomplished another step in installing the eDiemnsional stereo shutter glasses, unintentionally. I installed the latest NVIDIA display driver, and once that was done, an eDimensional installation tool that was still waiting in the background (after many reboots) noticed the new driver, and proceeded to install the NVIDIA stereo driver.

But still, even with the NVIDIA stereo driver installed and adding stereo settings to the NVIDIA-specific control panel, I can not get the stereo mode to work. Turning stereo mode on displays a test image that shows two strange-looking patterns, one on the left and one on the right. This appears to be the type of image meant for display systems that split the stereo pair on the left and right side of the screen, and then redisplay them via LCD goggles or something else.

But that’s not the frame-sequential method that the eDimensional glasses use, so it’s going to take some more sleuthing to figure out if I’ve got all the correct pieces installed.

Playing a hunch that the order of the devices in between my PC and monitor might make a difference, I plugged the eDimensional stereoscopic shutter glasses adapter directly into my computer, and the KVM switch into the adapter, and was pleasantly greeted with the image I expected on the CRT.

So, with that problem solved, I proceeded to install the eDimensional software and driver, and was troubled by several steps in the process. First was a warning that this install was only for Windows 2000 and Windows XP, and that I should quit and find the Windows 98/Windows Me installer in a different directory on the CD-ROM. I’m running Windows Media Center Edition 2004, which is based on Windows XP Professional, so it should not have given me this warning.

The second problem was that since I told it I had an NVIDIA graphics card, it wanted to install NVIDIA drivers, overwriting my existing driver. The last thing an application should ever have to do is to overwrite a system driver like this. And since I have no idea which driver this is, or if it’s compatible with Media Center, I have refused to install it, which I presume will make using the glasses problematic.

So I’ll be calling eDimensional tech support, to find out why this driver replacement is necessary.

The pair of eDimensional stereoscopic glasses I ordered yesterday arrived this morning, even though I had only paid for the 3-day FedEx shipping.

Unfortunately, when I plugged the interface box inbetween my KVM switch and my CRT display, the computer’s image failed to reach the monitor. I’m guessing that the use of two power-stealing devices is just too much for the poor-old VGA standard, and that I’ll have to ditch my KVM switch and find another way to get access to the other computers under my desk…

I’ve long advocated the stereoscopic viewing of CAD designs, as it greatly enhances the understanding of a design by non-technical reviewers, as well as the productivity of designers because it allows one to instantly see the real geometric relationships in 3D without having to spin the model around to orient one’s view of the model.

To test the consumer-level technology, I’ve just ordered a pair of E-D Wireless Glasses from eDimensional. This company appears to be the last company with a consumer gaming/entertainment focus selling stereo shutter glasses, so even though I’m not convinced their hardware uses the VESA standard 3-pin Mini DIN connector for stereo sync, I’ve decided that it’s the appropriate device to expect CAD visualization software to support. They can be had in a wired model for $70, little enough that governments and design clients alike could afford them for reviewing your designs.

But despite the benefits, the use of stereoscopic visualization in the CAD market has been little enough that the longest stalwart—StereoGraphics—has been acquired by REAL D—a startup with its sights directly on the entertainment market.

I can’t imagine REAL D will leave behind StereoGraphics’ existing customers in the automotive, aerospace, and scientific fields, but whether the new company expends significant efforts in these markets remains to be seen. In any case, if they do, any harmonization between the entertainment and design markets could increase the likelihood of stereoscopic content becoming successful.

I spent several hours yesterday researching what consumer stereo shutter glasses are still available—I even went down to Fry’s in a fruitless attempt to find them in a retail store. What amazed me was the number of different glasses that have been sold over the years, as well as the number of different methods used to connect the glasses to the computer.

From reading the Stereo3D charts—and just from common sense—it becomes clear that the only sensible interface standard is what this site calls “VESA-3″—the three-pin mini-DIN connector initiated by StereoGraphics and adopted as a standard by VESA.

After finishing that fishing expedition, I decided to visit StereoGraphics’ Web site, to see what they were up to, and discovered a pleasant surprise. The company announced at SolidWorks World that the next version of SolidWorks will be supporting its shutter glasses. This is great news, and tells me that that stereoscopic display is far from dead in the CAD industry.

So with this encouraging news, I’ll be adding stereoscopic support to my list of must-have features that I test with all CAD software.