Can't get NVIDIA 3D Goggles Working

Hardware
1

I have been trying to get this 3D goggles setup working for my lab for a while now. We have an Acer GN246HL 3D monitor and an NVIDIA emitter connected via USB only. We currently have the latest version of MATLAB and Psychtoolbox installed on Ubuntu 16.04. I have tried the following:

  • Linux ​Mint 12 can’t upgrade Psychtoolbox without errors. Need at least Psychtoolbox 12 to get MATLAB to turn on the emitter according to Psychtoolbox documentation. libnvstusb can turn on the emitter outside of MATLAB through the example code though, which produces syncing issues inside MATLAB as the emitter isn’t turned on by MATLAB.

  • Ubuntu 20.04 is too new. libnvstusb can’t be installed and hence emitter won’t work.

  • Ubuntu 16.04 can install all the config files and software perfectly, emitter can be turned on using MATLAB code, but emitter isn’t synced and goggles very slowly switch between the two eyes (takes seconds to switch, not 1/120th of a second). libnvstusb example code also produces a still image / very slow moving video. We tried both gnome and xfce and saw the same thing. NVIDIA driver version can only be upgraded to nvidia-384. Any newer version results in an infinite login screen at startup.

We tried different stereo values in xorg.conf and saw the goggles switch at different rates, so we think that’s partially responsible. We tried 0, 3, 10 and 11 and 0 seem to work best (though still much slower than it should be). The correct stereo value should be 11 since we are using NVIDIA 3D Vision 2 goggles, but that switches between the two eyes at an even slower rate.

My question is two folds: is Ubuntu 16.04 the right OS to use? If so how can we get it to work? If not, what OS/driver version, etc. do we need?

2

You’d need to get priority support for any advice on this. That said:

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is no longer officially supported by us, although the basics are assumed - but not verified - to still work with PTB 3.0.17. Ubuntu 16.04-LTS will reach official end-of-life by the end of this month.

The libnvstusb based stereo goggle support is experimental and was never verified by myself to work correctly, due to lack of hardware. The people who promised to donate test hardware for development all broke their promise, just wasting lots of my time in the end.

For further assistance you would have to buy priority support, probably multiple items for multiple hours of support, with absolutely no guarantee of success in the end due to the experimental nature of this feature. One hour is not much time to diagnose and fix such issues, especially not if i don’t have the hardware myself and have to get reacquainted with this code first.

I think NVidia itself cancelled the USB based NVision product a while ago and removed support for it from their proprietary drivers if i read correctly somewhere? A gpu with Vesa 3-pin mini din stereo connector would be the more reliable choice here.

-mario