I am trying to recreate the experiment from Mujoco Haptix, but I am having trouble making the model of the hand appear 3D. I have the nVidia glasses set up, and stereoscopic rendering is working when I test it from the nVidia control panel. I can press the stereo view on Mujoco, but all that happens is the screen becomes two screens, both showing the same hand model. Please let me now what I can do to make one of these compatible to view with the nVidia glasses in 3D.
Do you have a professional Quadro card or a consumer GTX card? MuJoCo uses quad-buffered OpenGL which NVidia only supports in their professional cards. The consumer cards can show 3D via Direct X (which is what most games use) but not via OpenGL. Assuming you have a Quadro card, and everything is set up properly for stereoscopic rendering, HAPTIX should just work. When you view the screen without glasses, you will see two images that are somewhat transparent and are superimposed on each other, with some misalignment. If stereo OpenGL is not available, HAPTIX will render "stereo" as side-by-side. This could be seen in 3D in VR HMDs, but not with the NVidia 3D glasses.
We have the GeForce GTX 1080 card, which is a consumer GTX card. We have the latest version of Direct X (version 12) installed. The image that shows up in HAPTIX after stereo is selected is two images of the original hand that is seen when the file is opened. There is no transparency, and the images are neither superimposed nor misaligned.
Right, so you need a Quadro card. I would recommend the Quadro P4000, because it is single-slot and reasonably priced, yet powerful enough for almost everything (including VR). MuJoCo does not use DirectX, only OpenGL.
Is there any way we can just buy a second GeForce GTX graphics card or two lower quality cards and run these simultaneously instead of buying a Quadro card? I know having multiple graphics cards working cooperatively is supposed to improve 3D performance.
That will not work. Multiple GPUs can indeed improve rendering performance, however the issue here is not performance. Stereoscopic OpenGL is considered by NVidia to be a professional feature, and is only available on their Quadro cards. Note that you cannot mix GTX and Quadro cards in the same system, because the drivers are different. So if you need to run HAPTIX in stereoscopic mode, you should replace your GTX with a Quadro.
Okay, thank you so much for your help. Will any nVidia Quadro card work? I couldn't find any other spec requirements on MuJoCo HAPTIX.
I would recommend the Quadro P4000. It is a good balance between price and performance, and is sufficient for MuJoCo.