Can XNA Game Studio be used to generate stereoscopic 3D on an Xbox 360 plugged into a 3D TV? If so, what are the key API calls that I should look at, or where can I find more information?
I ask knowing little about XNA Game Studio (though, I'm comfortable with C#) but needing to create some 3D visualizations.
I'm also happy to hear other low-cost and simple suggestions about getting stereoscopic 3D onto an ordinary consumer 3D TV.
The Xbox 360 does not natively support stereoscopic 3D. There are API's to retrieve the user settings for "3D enabled" and "screen size" so you can determine if and how to best render 3D content (screen size can be used to decide default convergence and parallax) but not for enabling 3D mode or doing the actual rendering (but you can do it manually).
To render 3D you have to generate two half resolution scaled views and place them into a single 2D frame, typically side-by-side or over-under (or other less common formats but best stick to those). The user must manually enable the 3D option on the TV and select the appropriate 3D format (SBS/OU) and the TV then separates the two images, up-scales to fill the screen, and displays them separately to each eye.
If you have a simple 2D game like a side-scroller and just want to add some simple depth layers then it is fairly straight-forward by adding horizontal displacement for each eye. Rendering stereoscopic 3D well for other games is not easy. Look for the PDF from Sony for an explanation of what works and what doesn't.
Not sure you can do it through the xbox, but it seems someone's done the same thing for the PC:
True stereoscopic quad buffering in XNA
Note that they're using XNA 3.1, which is superseded with XNA 4.0, the principle looks transferable though although you might need to change a few things around as classes/enums etc. have moved around a fair bit.
Disclamer: I've not done this before.
