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. It can also be specified at Chimera startup with --stereo. 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, not in stereo
  
  
• 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 stereo (also known as anaglyph) - overlapping left-eye and right-eye views in different colors, to be viewed with "glasses" (often inexpensive cardboard/plastic) with colored filters. 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, to be viewed with special synchronised glasses. Sequential stereo is not always available.
  
  
• reverse sequential stereo - as above, but swapping the two views to accommodate devices that use the opposite convention
  
  
• row stereo, right eye even - row-interleaved stereo, with even rows used for the right-eye view and odd rows used for the left-eye view. Row-interleaved stereo is used by 3D displays from Miracube, Zalman, and others. Users of these devices can try both row stereo options in Chimera to see which gives the best result.
  
  
• row stereo, right eye odd - as above, except swapping the two views to accommodate devices that use the opposite convention
  
  
• dome - angular fisheye of the hemisphere in front of the camera, with horizontal field of view locked to 90°
  
  
• truncated dome - same as the dome mode, except with the bottom of the hemisphere cut off
  
  
• DTI side-by-side stereo - for stereo viewing with DTI technology

Sequential Stereo - Limitations

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