eDimensional Wired 3D Glasses Review

Julio writes "Today at TechSpot we have reviewed eDimensional's Wired 3D Glasses, based on the original 3D Stereo technology that became popular a few years ago, these revamped version of the glasses seem to offer much more value and compatibility to the table. Adding amazing effects to games we tested which include Jedi Outcast and some other racing and flight simulators, this item could easily make it into your holiday shop list... "The images looked very cool, and I spent about 10 minutes gawking at my new surroundings. After playing around with Jedi Outcast, I was ready for more. I checked the supported game list, and just about every game I had was listed there.""

Comments

I'll only buy these if...

[mr_gerbik]

I'll only buy these if they support my favorite porn sites and virtual girlfriend games...

Headaches?

[masonbrown]

I worked at SGI for a while - they had stereo goggles years ago, even had a couple of pairs lying around. No one used them at all because they gave people SEVERE headaches....

Re:Headaches?

[fobbman]

Those older SGI glasses were twin 14" monitors strapped to the persons head. That might explain the headaches.

I own these glasses

[esac17]

But I currently have them up for sale. After purchasing them, I tried to get them to work with my ATI Radeon, and it had limited support.

It worked great for browsing the 3D pictures on their website, but when it came to games, nothing I did could get it to work properly.

I then tried it on my friends NVIDIA card, and we got quake3 working, and I have to admit, it is a lot better than the previous 3d glasses (ie; asus). After playing with them and being amazed for about 30 minutes, all I could really think though was 'novelty'. They didn't enhance game play in any way, and it actually took relearning some of my trained reactions in quake3.

Unfortunately my main goal was to get it working in Dungeon Siege, and I could never accomplish that.

2.5 stars/5

Re:I own these glasses

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Well that certainly puts me farther away from considering ATI in the future. Nvidia's 3d support is excellent.

NVidia's drivers work with Stereoscopic LCD shutter, and Red/blue (can't remember the technical name). Red/blue doesn't cause the headaches, but takes a long time to get used to, and is like playing on a computer indoors with heavily tinted sunglasses on (which is essentially what the glasses used for the effect are). After a while, you do adjust color perception to ignore the tint, but it still makes things far too dark for my tastes.

The major problem with shutter-based glasses is that most monitors don't support a refresh rate high enough for the trick to work without perceived flickering (which causes the headaches). A minimum of 120 hz is required to get a somewhat reasonable 60 frames/sec/eye. Unfornately most current displays don't support that high a rate at anything much over 800x600, which isn't really all that great for game play.

Given the choice between high-res, high quality graphics, and comparitively low-res stereoscopic displays, I'll take quality over stereo every time. Hope this improves soon.


Disclaimer: These appear to be the same glasses I already have, but since I can't get past the first page of the article, I can't tell if there has been some new breakthrough with them that I'm unaware of. Can't see how the glasses, being shutter based, can get around the Display Refresh issue, though)

Not quite 3 dimensional

[product byproduct]

eDimensional means 2.71828dimensional.

And how...

[Dark Lord Seth]

... would these glasses make my bash prompt look any better? Or emacs, for that matter.

Re:And how...

[_ph1ux_]

Thats why emacs sucks. Vi has supported these glasses for years.

I find I avoid headaches when using these...

[teamhasnoi]

by closing one eye.

As an ex-vr geek.

[Kenja]

I used to work for a small company called 3DTV that was a splinter group from Sterographics. I worked on software and marketing for hte first round of consumer shutter glasses, back when you had to use DOS (as in C:\) becuase Windows couldn't do page flipping synced to the monitor refresh rate (one flip per refresh). I for one was allways very fond of this tech', provided that you ran at 120hz or higher so that each eye is getting a full 60hz. In addition you need to turn off any other light source as even a basic light build has a refresh that can cause headaches if it is not in sync with the monitor (imagine every 10th frame being darker in one eye). Its very good to still see this stuff around.

Great glasses

[fobbman]

Heard in the basement of the parents house of the guy who houses the Tech Spot server...

Julio: "Oh man, these glasses are trick! That image of a burning server looks TOTALLY real.

Franko:Dude, you took the glasses off 10 minutes ago. That IS our server.

Games not yet made for 3-D

[phriedom]

I bought a set of Elsa Revalator glasses a while ago that use the same basic lcd shutter technology. They do "work" but the effect is underwhelming. You can't really use them for any First Person Shooter games because the crosshairs on your screen are also adjusted for each eye and the real impact point will be directly between them. Also, many games mix solids with planes, so for example the hallway will look 3-D but all the people in it will look like flat carboard cut-outs. The road will be 3-d but all the trees on the side will be flat. It turned out to be a far LESS immersive experience. I played with it for a couple days, then packed it away with other unused computer junk.

Re:But...

[_ph1ux_]

"Will it let you see the"

The what? Will it let me see the what? maybe you hit Submit to early?

Re:But what about..

[syrinx]

ok, I swear I thought that said "anus glasses".

i really need some sleep.

3D is less important than field of view

[localman]

I wish more research were put into expanding the field of view. There's plenty of data to indicate that stereoscopic vision is less important for bringing you "into the scene" than a wide field of view. Here's a choice quote from The Visionary Position:

"By experimenting with the display -- moving, by degrees, from a 20-degree field of view to a 30-degree field of view and so on up to 120 degrees, the team discovered that at the "60- to 80-degree point, it was like a switch went off in your head. Instead of looking at a picture, all of a sudden you thought you were in a place. You had a different way of interacting with the display. You brought in a different set of innate capabilities."

And that was in 1982. But to this day VR seems to mean 3D on a small square screen. I mean, c'mon, we've had 3D TV & movies for almost a century. It's just not that cool. I'd take Omnimax (not to be confused with Imax) any day :)

Ah well, I can always dream and complain ;)

Headaches.

[Catskul]

Stereo vision is only noticeable to about 30 feet out. This isnt very impressive when using a pair of 3d glasses looking at objects that are typically farther out, so I would assume that makers of 3d glasses would exaggerate the effect.

What this means is that disparity of two correlated points in the two images is greater than it should be. Your brain determines the distance more based on other cues than stereo disparity. So when it gets confliciting signals about the distance of an object your eyes have a hard time adjusting their inward tilt(to increase the overlapping visual area), this is sometimes called "eyeball lock in".

The conflicting messages of inward tilt(Brain: "Somthing is close to you Eyes!"), outward tilt (Brain: "Something is farther away Eyes!") make the eye muscles try and do the same thing at once and cause strain. Its the same strain of when you put your finger really close to the bridge of your nose and try to concentrate on it. I think this is what causes the headaches.