I recently had a chance to don a pair of LCD shutter glasses and stare into a synthesized 3D image that popped out of the screen at me. Cascading colors flowed around obstacles. I could move my head around and see how the pattern of colors moved in and around the objects in the foreground.

No, this wasn’t a scene I witnessed in Avatar, which I also viewed in 3D IMAX, it was a demo of Agilent’s new 3D glasses incorporated in an upgrade to their popular Momentum field solver suite. I had a chance to sample the new 3D vision system at the FPGA Camp in San Jose on Nov 11, 2009. Wow! Pretty darn cool!

Agilent EMProTightly coupled into the Agilent’s ADS simulation environment are Momentum, which does 2.5 D full wave simulations and EMPro which does 3D full wave simulation. While both of these tools can show 3D perspectives of the static or dynamic, electric or magnetic fields or currents in and around conductors, the simulations seem to come alive when viewed in true 3D.

To make this possible, Agilent has teamed with Nvidia to leverage their high end GPUs for the visual processing. The 3D images are generated by projecting on the monitor an image for just the right eye, while synchronized with the opened right eye shutter on the LCD glasses, and then projecting the image for the left eye.

The frame rate is high enough so that you don’t perceive the flicker, but see the screen in true 3D, giving the sense of having the object, and its field distribution, projecting in front of the screen. I suppose the next step is to incorporate a 3D mouse pointer and be able to move it around to interact with the 3D environment.

If you want to learn more about this novel imaging feature, be sure to check out the webinar Agilent is providing on Jan 21, 2009. You can sign up at this link.

I can’t wait to find the right demos to use for my upcoming live classes. One of these days soon, if I hand you a pair of LCD glasses when you walk into the room, you’ll know what to expect.