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It's wouldn't be susceptible to parallax error. They had it in the Star Trek future, why can't we have it in our proper future?

Man is annoyed by this.

Does it come with Aspirin?

Who thought of selling a 3d display system for gaming?

Let's see. How many gamers watch porn regularly?
Now, how many non-gamers watch porn regularly?
And finally, how many games get so greater for being in 3d as porn?

How hard can it be to sell a product with "Full 3D titties. $X. Pay here."

How hard? I ask you.

Nothing new. I got these with my Asus V7700 GFX card (a very good card, btw!) - but they had a cable rather than wireless sync. The GFX card had an extra connector for these. The glasses worked but needed calibrating and were a guarantee for headache after playing for 10 minutes or so. But Dark Reign 2 and simular games looked really cool with them. For 3D RTS I think something like this can even give you an advantage - if you can raise your monitor refresh rate enough, that is.

the NVIDIA software is able to construct a stereo 3D image out of existing game content while the 120 Hz requirement gives each eye 60 frames of motion per second negating the physical detriments that were known to occur with previous 3D offerings.

Well, except that some of us can still see the 60Hz flicker. I want to gouge my eyes out looking at anything less than 75Hz, which would work out to 150Hz combined for this technology.

To understand why this may be a poor choice for 3D glasses technology for consumers, as well as some thoughts on why NVIDIA might have gone with it anyways, here's an article [theinquirer.net] that gets into the nitty gritty. Brief summary; headaches and batteries.

(Insert usual disclaimer about the Inquirer not exactly being an enthusiastic supporter of NVIDIA here..)

I've owned and used heavily 2 stereoscopic 3d systems.

One used a large CRT monitor that could run at 150Hz. I had two different 3d shutter glasses I used. I remember having to do quite a bit of tweaking with each game I wanted to play, but eventually I was able to get 'perfect' effects that were completely and totally awesome.

You can't really know til you try it, but 3d can make games feel dramatically more real. It can make even older games look a LOT better. Deus Ex was pretty darn awesome looking when your weapons actually have depth to them, and so do the enemies.

I then built a passive stereoscopic rig using polarized glasses and 2 LCD monitors, as well as a half-silvered mirror. Total cost : about $650. That one also ruled, and worked better than the shutter glasses. I found that the killer app game for it was World of Warcraft.

This was 18 months ago : I was playing WoW in full 3d. I had to disable just 1 effect to get it to work perfectly, all of the time, smooth as glass. Again, a lot of the graphics of that game look amazing when they have depth, because your brain automatically fills in details that aren't really in the low detail graphics.

Why did I quit? Time, and the fact that Nvidia basically abandoned stereo 3d for a while. My 8800GT did not work at all for a long time. Stereo 3d IS worth it, but it requires heavy driver support or it doesn't work.

Also, I never could eliminate "ghosting". That is where the images from one eye leak into the other. One game in particular, a horror game, was AWESOME and VASTLY more scary with depth. The problem was, the dark shadows and flashlights would create various halos on the screen from ghosting which was very unrealistic and distracting.

Ghosting is inherent to shutter glasses. The only 3d tech that completely eliminates it is a headset with a separate display for each eye. However, no affordable, high resolution headsets are available on the market today. (and when I say affordable, I mean for any reasonable price. You cannot get a high resolution head mounted display for even $2000)

I may be responsible for the fact that Duke Nukem 4ever has yet to be released.

A year or three (a long time ago, I don't remember exactly when) after Duke Nukem 3-D came out, there was a gaming discussion site called Planet Crap. It was a low visibility site, and most of the folks who posted there tried to keep it that way, not mentioning or linking it on their own sites.

It was a site shared by gamers, game webmasters (who were of course all gamers), and industry insiders. Warren Marshall posted there (he was a pirate in his college days, which is why he fears pirates so badly), as did several of his artists and programmers. People from ID posted there, and Charles Broussard and his people posted there as well.

There was a discussion one day, I don't remember the topic, but Mr. broussard was posting. I wondered out loud why Duke Nukem 3-D was not really 3-D at all, but 2-D perspective. Charles said something to the effect of "we don't yet have holographic displays". I mentioned stereoscopic viewing and suggested red/green glasses.

Duke Nukem 4ever became more and more a joke as time went by, but I've always wondered if they were working on a true 3-D game. These glasses in TFA would do the trick far better than the red/green glasses.

I also wonder when we're going to have truly holographic displays? All one would need would be a high enough resolution LCD, with instead of a white backlight, a mirrored back and a laser frontlight. It would be monochromatic, but I think you could work it out with three lasers each firing in turn and tied to display different diffraction patters so that it could be true color, true 3-D. It would be more than stereoscopic viewing as these glasses are, but true 3-D, so you could actually see around the displayed objects by moving your head (if you've ever seen a real hologram you know what I mean).

I've had this question since the tech was shown last year. Can you choose to run this on older displays? Some people still have older 120hz+ capable CRTs that should work just fine. Other people, like myself, have never had a problem with eyestrain on low refresh monitors and would like to try it on their existing monitors. Mine is a brand new 28" LCD with ~85hz max refresh. I have no intention of spending more money on a new monitor after having just purchased one, especially not a monitor significantly smaller than what I have now.

The article, however, suggests that the drivers are designed to check for (not just the 120hz capability) but for specific models of monitor that are "approved" by Nvidia. What I think is going on here is very similar to what happened when they released their first Stereo 3d drivers for Vista and I consider it a product tie-in scam as well as poor treatment of their customers.

Nvidia sold people on the 3d shutter glasses tech years ago. When CRTs died and the first generation of LCDs couldn't handle decent refresh rates Nvidia dropped support for the drivers. They didn't do it in a classy way, they just stopped talking about it and left their customers hanging. They never made it clear that they weren't going to update them and when rumors spread about stereo support being planned for the 8800 series people bought the new cards expecting the drivers that never came. Again, Nvidia kept quiet.

When news of the upcoming Vista stereo drivers started leaking, with what seemed to be tacit confirmation from Nvidia, people that had spent money on the hardware were excited. They were in for a rude awakening when it turned out that Nvidia had gone as far as to remove support for any stereo hardware they had pushed in the past and tried to require specific models of 3D monitors sold by their business partners. Basically, my understanding is, they had screwed over their past and present customers by handy-capping their drivers in exchange for payment from the monitor company. Here is a company that wants us to buy their video card (and now their shutter glasses) but is also trying to force us to throw out our present monitors, whether we need to or not, before we are allowed to use their 3d features and the only real justification is an artificial software block they put there themselves.

This is what I think is happening here again. I think they've probably made a deal with the monitor/projector manufacturers to be paid for the "Nvidia Approved" status which is why only two displays are allowed regardless of all the older CRTs still existing that match their supposed justification of high refresh rate. I'm smart enough to understand that it took extra work to go out of their way to take the power to decide for myself away from me. Nvidia needs to remember who their actual customers are and stop treating them as an afterthought. They're already on shaky ground with their present generation of cards competing poorly against ATI for price/performance. I, certainly, don't need Nvidia trying to force a Mitsubishi (or any other specific company's) monitor down my throat before I'm able to use a Nvidia product).