OglPlane

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
//
//***********************************************************************