Wow...that looks like it would be something awesome to have. Makes me want one from the description.

Yeah, I had a class last semester which spent a ton of time going on about different ways of simulating 3D, and after weeeeks and weeks of it, as well as a couple reviews saying good things, I'm really interested ._.

Well, you have me really interested now.

Doesn't this mean you need to cross your eyes or wear 3D Glasses?
Sure, it's cool, but I have the feeling it'll lose its coolness because it can't be widely adopted :o

You do wear glasses, yes. They alternate which eye they block every 120th of a second. And unfortunately the 3D effect only works for people wearing the glasses ($200 apiece, but they come with the $600 bundle).

Don't know what you mean about it not being widely adopted. A ton of games have official support for it, and the list is just getting better all the time. As far as not many people buying into the technology, it doesn't really matter--as long as they keep making 120 Hz displays, the glasses should continue to work :3

I just read an extensive article about this.

From what I read it seems like when a game supports it, it becomes a great experience. Even people who used it and weren't "omg crazy" about it, missed the sense of depth when they went back to normal gaming.

If i wasn't trying to save up and move out I would have bought a monitor like that a while ago.

Just skimming the list of games with Excellent and Good support, I'm struggling to fight a boner. Warcraft III or any RTS in 3D? omg omg omg. FEAR 2? I already freak the shit out when Alma grabs me in 2D. Civ IV? Watching my fighter jets patrol above my cities? Eeeee.

But yeah, I'm afraid that if I were to go back to a regular display, I'd be "ruined" so to say xD

That's pretty much how everyone feels XD

Normal life just seems so dull afterwards

I wonder how well stereoscopic stuff works with head tracking. That might make me cry with joy.

I forget which, I think it's polarized that fails with head tracking. Stereoscoping is supposed to be really good with it

Only thing is that stereoscopic stuff, unless it can detect your head orientation, assumes that your eyes are level, and displays the two images with a horizontal offset. If you tilt your head to the side, the images won't match up. So no head canting D:

From what i read they should be awsome for gaming (you need special glasses for them i think) but they're a bitch to work on normaly like reading since the picture information is always slightly "offset" for each eye

Oh, well I'm sure they have settings so it doesn't do the 3D effect all the time. After all, it's just a 120 Hz monitor, and it doesn't have to alternate the images for each eye unless the 3D driver tells it to. As cool as Vista would be with 3D, unless I'm playing a game I think I'd go without glasses and without 3D.

Besides, I use my laptop for reading and chatting, my desktop for strictly gaming and movies :3

Well from the article it also says it makes in game text hard to read so playing text heavy games is hard (plus it says very few games are actually "compatible" so far)

Dont wanna be the killjoy, just telling some "facts" i read about (btw didnt read that online but in a mag i got)

Fortunately, many of the games I play today are compatible. I just went down the list of My Favorites on Steam, the breakdown was this:

Compatible:
Bioshock
FEAR 2
Fallout 3
FarCry 2
Garry's Mod
Left 4 Dead
Mass Effect
STALKER: Clear Sky
Sid Meier's Civilization IV
Team Fortress 2

Unspecified:
Audiosurf
Peggle Delux (2D anyway)
Unreal Tournament 3
World of Goo (2D anyway)
X2: The Threat

I wonder if Portal is compatible...

It is.

*face erupts into the biggest :D face ever* need to start saving....now!

I don't know how well it works with the portals, though. Hopefully it'd preserve the depth values through the portals, so things on the other side would appear 3D. If they were lazy about it, they'd just put a camera where the portal is and take a screenshot from that perspective, then use it as a texture. It could either be extremely compelling or extremely distracting.

for that price, I hope it's the former

Has nothing to do with the price, just how Valve made the effect in the game ^^'

I have got to try this very thing out before recently in a computer gaming room at Radcon. It was amazing. It is like having the 3d from a theater on your computer. I pan on getting a setup like it as soon as I can. The monitor is the real key to get it to work right, it needs a real refresh rate of 120 frames per second at least. There are not a lot of LCDs that are able to pull it off, if you stick to the recommended list for monitors or get that little bundle on the site you will be gold.

Yeah, due to laziness I'd probably just nab the bundle they offer.

So did you literally try the glasses and such that I linked to? Knowing that it's a great experience is good, but if you used these particular ones, that'd be even more motivating.

*nods* Indeed I did. It was awesome and I really miss it now not having it yet my self. D:

Hm. Do want o.o

I wouldnt do it seeing how new it is there will be huge compatibilty problems =/ and will work for very very few programs/games

Well, check the list of games with official support for it: http://www.nvidia.com/object/GeForc....._3D_Games.html

From what I understand, though, those are just the games which have official support, so like, the driver will load up optimal settings for those games to make the 3D depth feel best, things like that. Nvidia's been making a 3D stereoscopic driver for years, I believe... just hasn't been a major push in the consumer space.

I would try and test it somehow first cause everyone has there own built in settings of how they see 3d like polar express i couldnt see anything in 3d then i watched superman on the same TV as everything worked just fine Meh for all i know they have settings for that but its somthing to look in to

http://www.emotiv.com/ =D thats something i have invested in

How well does that work?

Duno they havent shiped it yet but ive seen it on every major sicence channel and website and game channel =]

Wow, I thought about this concept after seeing Coraline and didn't think it'd be possible to do for modern gaming.

Wouldn't it require the computer to render the game twice? Or does it just jostle the camera super-fast?

Essentially, yes. It requires twice the framerate. For each frame it alternates between rendering for the left and right eyes. Because it displays at twice the rate of regular monitors (120 Hz vs 60) it should look smooth.

Ah, like I thought. So it'd need to be... even better than top-of-the-line.

Well, way I figure, my current computer is quite well-off in the graphics department. I run all my games on max settings, 1920x1200, often with anti-aliasing simply because I'm way past 60 frames per second. This display would only be 76% the resolution, and I could certainly turn down the anti-aliasing to get 120 frames per second, if it meant I could get 3D.

Of course, my other alternative, a 30" display, would mean 78% higher resolution, so I'd also need to sacrifice some anti-aliasing to still keep that going at 60 fps...

Also, the really wicked advantage I'd have from it being a 120 Hz display is that if a game didn't support 3D I could still play it normally, and just get really high framerates. Really fluid motion. The eye can detect motion above 60 Hz in some cases, but when you get up to 120, things just look so smooth, it's creepy. So even for games and such which don't support 3D, I'd still have a display which is awesome in another way.

Lotofdisposableincome I mean that's pretty cool.

120 FPS is pretty god damn absurd. I think you know how absurd that is.

Not as absurd as people might think. I have two mid-range graphics cards and I'm entirely confident that they'll be able to push 1680x1050 @ 100+ fps. I might need to turn down some of the settings (mostly anti-aliasing) to get it, but it's not like I'll have to run shit on Low >_>'

Well, if you're willing to hack a wii console you could make one yourself.

You're thinking of motion parallax (Johnny Lee's Wiimote videos). That's an entirely different technology which adjusts the camera in-game based on your head location. It's actually a much more powerful 3D effect than stereoscopic stuff (which is what I'm talking about) but you only get it when you move your head. Stereoscopic stuff simply looks 3D all the time.

My mistake.

And yes, I've been following Chung Lee's site for awhile now.

I wouldn't buy it but then again most advance games and programs on my computer at the moment is Battle for Wesnoth, GIMP and Vim at the moment.

You should try it out before putting down that kind of money.

God, I'd really really like to. At this point all I can go on to make a decision are the testimonies of other people and the good sign that I've never been motion sick in my life.

I've owned a set of 3d glasses for computers before, but this was years ago, so it's probably much, much better since then.

Felt nifty, but somewhat gimmeky at the same time. It's one of those things that exciting at first, but feels more like a novelty item after a few uses.

Hell, I've burned through hundreds on game consoles like the Wii and Gamecube, for which I only enjoyed a couple games each ;3

Twilecock in 3D!

Heh heh, only if Second Life works with it.

Way back about 9 years ago, these were really popular with CRTs (since CRTs could handle the refresh rate no problem, but LCD screens effectively killed 3D glasses until recently). I had a set back then, and it was a lot of fun. You really had to take a break after 30 mins of gameplay to give your eyes a break though.

Most games worked mostly, but almost no games worked completely. What happened was that almost all games have some 2D elements which the card can't interpolate to 3D. So status bars, menus, maps, stuff like that would be out of place. But the games were still playable, and it was a very cool experience!!

Hm. Most CRTs I had before switching to LCDs capped out at around 85 Hz, these new LCDs hit 120. Might help with eyestrain? And I'd imagine that improved support on Nvidia's part would help make things more suited for 3D gameplay :3

My CRT went to 140 (which was nice, i could still get 70Hz per eye). But LCDs might help a lot with eyestrain. The thing with CRT's is the glasses had to match the scanning on the monitor for it to work best (ie: if the top half of the monitor was on the left eye and the bottom half on the right, the glasses should match). LCDs don't have that issue, so it might be better. Glasses technology might have improved too.

I'm hoping it's all gotten lots better =D

Ah, it's a shame my PC is the tiniest of margins below the minimum spec for 3D vision or I would have tried it out. However, a friend of mine recently shelled out god knows how much money on a new PC with 2x280's in it. I'll nudge him about 3D vision ^^

;-; I really wanna tryyyy it

I have experience watching IMAX movies in 3D and they use the same sort of technology.

I think it would be a waste of money honestly. It would be neat to try once, but it would be annoying to use regularly. You have to keep your eyes focused at a certain distance, despite the overpowering urge to do otherwise. And perhaps you're not aware, but a LOT of effects in 3D games are still simple 2D sprites overlaid on the screen with no 3D information contained in them. What that means is instead of seeing a 3D explosion, you'll see what appears to be a 2D photo of an explosion hanging in 3D space in front of whatever blew up.

Hm. That's a good point, why didn't that occur to me? The focal distance thing, I mean.

The explosions bit really depends on the game, of course.

That seems like a cool idea, but I don't know of how well it actually 3D-izes things. Judging by the documentation though, it still seems pretty new and less than fantastic.

However, if you do get one, let us know how it works out. :>

Well, to get the effect I'm guessing you'd only need to shift the camera placement a little to each side and render from there, which should work well with anything made from a 3D model... not so well for sprite effects and the like D:

I'm going to go out on a limb here, but I think they may be able to do such with directx, which would then mean any directx game, but it seems sorta iffy.

Hmm. I know a bit about graphics, it'd just require changing the camera matrix and re-rendering, but I dunno... >_>

I've not tried the alternating-eye 3D on a desktop, though I have played with bed-blue 3D. I've even fiddled with making Magic Eye images, and have wondered if making moving Magic Eye images is doable, or if it would make eyeballs melt. I only like the concept of using Magic Eye techniques because no equipment is needed at all, just the basic skill in seeing the encoded images.

Unfortunately, Magic Eye techniques are very straining on the eyes, hard to use with motion, and basically incompatible with color, texture, and fine details. I mean, look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:S.....hark_Small.gif It's possible to see that it's a swimming shark, yes, but it's very poor detail, lacks intentional color, and the movement of the pattern is ungodly distracting.

Hmm...some of the hard-to-view aspects of that image is due to an aliasing effect, but yes, I see what you mean. It's useable for 3D when no equipment is available, but it's the bottom of the heap.

oh great. now i want one >_<

D: Sorry!

lol s'ok i'm always attracted to flashy tech. things...then add gaming and I'm sold ^_^

Cant say I have. The tech has been around forever though. Though I do want that monitor. Saamsung

What do you want to know?

The pros and cons. The ins and outs. All sorts of stuff. How do sprite-based explosions look? If I can notice CRTs refreshing at 60 Hz when I look straight at them, will this irritate my eyes or give me a headache? If a game doesn't have any advertised support for it, will it work at all? Does it have more than, less than, or exactly twice the performance cost for the same apparent framerate? How far can I tilt my head to the side before the frames no longer merge, or in general, how much freedom of position and motion can my head have before the 3D effect is lost? Can the Vista Explorer be 3D-ized (I assume not)?

You know, stuff like that.

http://forums.penny-arcade.com/show.....ad.php?t=79735

I could give you all I know, but that thread is a good resource anyway.

D: A lot of the people on there don't seem terribly informed...

A couple are, a couple actually bought them and are giving feedback, I'd read their shit.