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| In 1838, Charles Wheatstone invented the world's
first stereoscopic viewer based on Renaissance theories of perspective.
Constructed of an assortment of angled mirrors, his invention contained two
separate drawings - one for the left eye and one for the right. When both images
were observed at the same time, Wheatstone's viewing device produced a stereo
image. Wheatstone's device encouraged the beginning of a new era in motion and
still photography.
All of this 3D stuff began back in the 386 era when Wolfenstien 3D came out. It was an outrageously popular game for the time, showing people that their lowly PCs can do more than they thought. People were absolutely amazed that PCs could display 3D imagery at interactive frame rates. Even on high powered graphics workstations, you couldn't do that. Well, ID proved everyone wrong. The idea behind Wolf3d is that all of the walls are spaced evenly on an 8x8 foot grid. In other words, each of the walls had to be aligned to a multiple of 90 degrees, and had to be the same height. These restrictions made it possible to make many assumptions about the engine and make rendering very fast. The floor and ceiling of the environment was not texture mapped, but it was added to the engine in games after it, such as Blake Stone. Doom took a radically different approach to rendering the 3 dimensional data. It is a true polygonal engine, but it has limitations of it's own. These limitations include the inability to tilt the view, and the inability to have walls that are not vertical. Also, you cannot have maps that have more than one level in the same place. Although these limitations are certainly much less than Wolf's, they aren't bad. Doom was a break through in technology. |