I’ve just found myself wanting to test some OpenGL stereo and I couldn’t find the old-school OglPlane.exe program.

It’s a simple program opening an OpenGL window with quad-buffer stereo and displaying a stereoscopic wireframe paper plane :

We use that regularly to debug stereo :

Client: There is no stereo in Virtools! It’s all your fault, I hate you!

Us: Could you run oglplane and tell us if it’s in stereo ?

Client: No it’s not, I’m sure Virtools broke everything!

Us: Could you activate the stereo in the graphics card drivers ?

Client: Ha, now the plane is in stereo, but still not Virtools, you morons!

Us: Could you change the Virtools stereo parameters ?

No answer from client.

Alright maybe it’s because of the Virtools’ documentation =)

OglPlane was developped by Stereographics, makers of the famous 3d glasses and stereo handbook, which was bought by RealD.

It seems the software was hosted on RealD website but I really can’t find it, so I got it on my work laptop and uploaded here:

Oglplane.zip

(If you’re from RealD, don’t sue me, let’s talk about it 😉

The zip also contains the source code and visual studio project so you can also learn how to setup quad-buffered OpenGL.

First edition : 1991. Wow, that’s really old-school 3D !!

//***********************************************************************
//
//  OGLPlane.cpp
//  by Bob Akka, StereoGraphics Corporation, July 1998
//
//  Some history:
//      April 1991: Original SGI GL program, by Bob Akka, StereoGraphics.
//      Date unknown: Converted to OpenGL by Silicon Graphics Corp.
//      March 1995: Modified (Motif), by James S. Lipscomb and Keh-Shin Cheng,
//          IBM Research.
//      December 1996: Converted to use OpenGL Utility Toolkit,
//          by Rick Hammerstone, Digital.
//      February 1998: Converted to use WIN32 OpenGL GLAUX Toolkit,
//          by Dave Milici, StereoGraphics.
//      July 1998: Rewritten in plain OpenGL, for MFC Windows environment,
//          program simplified in some ways, EnableStereoWindow() is brand new,
//          DrawAirplane() carefully restored to original classic April 1991
//          geometry, real-time stereo and rotation adjustments added, and…
//          StereoProjection() overhauled & comments added (StereoProjection()
//          is now so thoroughly commented that it is practically a tutorial),
//          by Bob Akka, StereoGraphics.
//      September 1999: Blueline index support added (this is used by some SGC
//          hardware systems)
//
//  Note: This program does not deal with the possible situation where the
//      user switches Windows display settings while this program is running
//
//***********************************************************************