3D is spectacular, eye catching and can amaze your audience.. But unfortunately it was not really accessible to live VJing.. until now!

Recently we’ve been in contact with Alioscopy, a French company that develops auto-stereoscopic 3D displays that can produce a sensation of depth without needing cumbersome eyewear and they asked us if we could bring live VJing to their 3D screens.

The problem is, even if you are only mixing footage that is compatible with 3D projection you are still missing live visualizers which are, most of the time, a very important part of the mix and which obviously can’t be pre-encoded for 3D projection..

Alioscopy’s 3D display range currently includes 24?, 42? and 47? screens integrating a technology that is based on standard Full HD LCD displays but equipped with an array of lenticular lenses. Each lens overlaps 8 different points of view and casts different images onto each eye, allowing for one only to be seen through the lens from any given angle.

Thus to recreate this feeling of depth, a 3D scene needs to be rendered from 8 different points of view and combined to one auto-stereoscopic image. To achieve this, we developed an easy to use auto-stereoscopic Quartz Composition template wherein you can transform your original Quartz Composer composition to a obtain real 3D sensation on an Alioscopy screen.

Integrating support for Alioscopy in GrandVJ through a Quartz Composition template was a logical step since GrandVJ now fully supports Quartz since version 1.2. – and of course, the same integration will also be supported in MediaMaster – But the big advantage of a Quartz template is that it’s fully customizable by the user; you can fine-tune the depth effect exactly the way you want!

When edited in Quartz Composer, the template appears as a layer above the original composition. Descend the patch hierarchy, paste your scene, adapt the auto-stereoscopic parameters depending on your scene and you’re done. The 3D-enabled composition can be used and mixed as any other Quartz Composition in GrandVJ but of course, it must be output to an Alioscopy screen to see the magic happen.

Now we just have to decide how we are going to go to the market with this new development but you should read more about this very soon..