I’ve seen adverts for 3d glasses for some time, the old TNT graphics cards use to come with support for ‘revelator’ glasses and the nVidia drivers had stero support built in for many years. However due to the way these glasses work you’ve always needed a CRT monitor with a high refresh rate (~120hz) to see the effect. Moving back to a mahoosive CRT and an ancient gfx card isn’t really an option if you want to play any newer games, so I (and I’m sure many others) have never really had a chance to try them out.

Recently I noticed an advert for these eDimensional Wireless 3D Glasses that claim to work on a standard LCD screen and promise you will “experience the latest in virtual reality technology with 3D images that float inside and outside of your monitor” in “all of your favorite gaming titles”. Hmmm, but as they were realatively cheap (sub £50) I thought I’d give them a go. There seems to be very little info on these glasses out there on the net post ‘05, which is about when nVidia stopped supporting it’s consumer stereo 3d driver. I though a quick review could be useful for anyone else interested in giving stereoscopic 3d gaming a try on an LCD.

What’s in the pack
The product comes in a simple plastic pack (thankfully not the annoying kind you can’t get into without scissors or lacerated fingers) containing :

• 1 pair of wireless glasses
• 1 ‘dongle’
• 1 IR transmitter
• 1 driver cd
• 1 setup guide

Overall the package feels pretty cheap, this is no Apple unboxing experience The glasses themselves are plastic and fairly sturdy, they’ll survive a drop but not a sitting on. They are light weight and have adjustable arms that fit fine over regular glasses. As I got the wireless version they come with a watch type battery preinstalled that apparently works for ~50 hours before it needs replacing. I’ve done about 30 so far and it’s still going strong. I ordered directly from eDimensional’s UK site and despite paying extra for next day delivery I received them 3 days later

How do they work?
All stereoscopic viewing systems work by presenting a slightly different image to the left and right eyes, just like the old red&blue 3d glasses. These eDimensional glasses have an lcd shutter over each eye that can switch from almost opaque to clear very quickly. By switching each eye on and off in synch with the alternating images on screen you get the impression of stereo 3d, the kind of 3d you feel you can almost reach ‘into’ the monitor to touch.

The problem has always been that to do this well without headache inducing flicker you need to effectively double the rate at which you display the images on screen, so if you want to see 60fps in each eye your monitor needs to be doing 120fps. LCD’s do 60-72 refreshes per second, so this is not possible. So you need a CRT monitor for stereo 3d, it’s what all the people on all the forums say! Let’s find out…

Setting it up
The large dongle plugs into the back of your gfx card and sits between the card and the monitor. You plug the monitor cable in to the dongle. All connections are analogue so I had to fish out a DVI to analogue adapter and cable to attach it to my 24″ Dell LCD Monitor (1920×1200). The dongle’s cord isn’t long enough for it to reach to the top of my case to sit neatly on so it has to hang rather clumsily at the back. The IR transmitter also plugs into the dongle and has a meter or so of thin cable and a small sticky velcro pad to attach it to your monitor (a bit like a tiny wii sensor bar, which is what it basically is). The transmitter gives out IR pulses that the glasses pick up and synch to, so position is important and too much direct sunlight can also interfere with the signal I found.

Setup of the hardware takes about 5 minutes in all and is pretty idiot proof.

Drivers
You’ve got two options here, if you have an old nVidia card and a CRT you can use nVidias ancient drivers. Or you can use the supplied eDimensional software with any nVidia or ATi gfx card and both LCD and CRT monitors. Guess which one I went for? (hint… not nVidia)

The software’s quite small and self contained, no spy/bloatware here. It installs an icon in the system tray from which you can launch the control panel. When the driver is active and working with the game you are playing it provides hotkeys to toggle the 3d on and off, and to tune up and down both the near and far focus points. This is important as it’s playing with these focus points that allows you to get the best 3d image.

So, does it work?

Well, the answer is a resounding YES….. SOMETIMES

I tried with a lot of games, both old and new, and when it works it really can be amazing, your screen becomes a portal into a little world of real 3d characters and places. There’s a bit of an issue with the size of everything, as it really looks like things are inside your monitor it also feels like you’re playing your games inside a small box with little action-men figures, but it does add a whole new level to the exprience and you can happily play through old games again just gawping at the new scenery. Unfortunately this is where you’ll hit a bit of a stumbling block, as so few games seem to work well with the driver and many require careful tweaking of the game settings to get working it can become a frustrating experience.

In testing I’ve found that the game experience falls into one of four categories…

• Amazing, that’s like real 3d, wow, cool!!
• Hmm, it’s 3d but it’s broken?
• Hmm, it’s kinda working I think? Hmm, maybe not… yeah, no … my eyes hurt!
• Crash!

I had the most luck with DOOM3 engined games, e.g. DOOM3, PREY and Quake 3 Arena all fell into the amazing category. The drivers make everything darker (as at any one time one of your eyes is blacked out by the glasses) and introduce a kind of interlaced grain to the games which you get used to quite quickly and actually adds to the atmosphere in dark scary games. The 3d effect is amazing when you get it tuned in right, with a great sense of real depth and a real feeling you could reach in and pluck the little stroggs right out of the screen. Quake 1 also ran pretty nicely

Unfortunately several games fell into the 3d but broken category. Race07 worked but ran at about 5fps with the drivers on, World In Conflict works but has the mini-map stuck fullscreen over the top of it in game. Most dissapointing were the steam powered games which all seemed to have an issue with shader based textures (so any cool water, lava, video etc effects on objects) that make them skip the 3d and appear to float righ infront of your eyes. How much this effects the game varies, HalfLife2 was still fun but a bit odd in places, portal was virtualy unplayable.

Most dissapointingly many games simply didn’t work with the eDimensional drivers running, and crashed back to the desktop either immediately or as you try to start a game. These included COD4, Bioshock, ET:QW, Company of Heroes & Battlefield 2.

Most confusing were the games that I couldn’t really be sure if something was happening or not. The eDimensional drivers allow you to turn the in-game hotkeys off, and this seemed to be required to prevent some games crashing (many others still crashed unless the river was quit completely). So when you play a game with the hotkeys off you can still turn the 3d effect on but there’s no way to adjust the 3d. This leads to games having a kind of flat 3d effect to them at times, something approaching a proper 3d effect at other times, and absolutely nothing at other times. To be honest I was never really sure if the drver was doing anything or if it’s simply the shutters flickering infront of your eyes that induces a fake 3d effect?

Summary

When they work these things are great. The definately can work with an LCD screen, perhaps not as well as with an LCD (according to others) but it’s still pretty cool. Unfortunately the drawback here seems to be the eDimensional drivers, they just feel cheap and unreliable and the number of hoops they force you through to get some games running is extreme. Infact the real issue seems to be eDimensional itself, their website is clunky, low in content and full of broken links, the driver on the site is older than the one I got with the package (and in some games I found the old driver to work better, so try them both), the faq is very poor etc. I’ve not tried contacting their support so can’t comment there.

What we really need is either (or ideally both of) these things to happen…

• eDimmensional opensource their drivers, allowing people to fix them and create a proper community around them, while they concentrate on selling the hardware cheaply and to as many people as possible
• Nvidia release a new version of their 3d drivers that supports new cards and new games (with advanced dx9 stuff) and also works with these shutter glasses.

Either of these could push stereo 3d into the mainstream again, but without them this is going to remain a hobbyist niche. For now, if your interested in 3d gaming and patient enough to mess around with the settings I’d recommend you get a pair to play with, but don’t expect too much. Oh, and you may as well get the wired ones, they’ll save you £20 and you won’t need to fiddle with batteries.

**Note : although a lot of my blog’s about Linux, these glasses are XP only. An opensource Linux driver would be very cool and certainly possible… anyone?

**Note 2 : although a lot of my blog’s about Flash, these glasses don’t do anything to Flash content, even papervision stuff. As far as I can make out the drivers rely on grabbing the low level 3d info from the DirectX or OpenGL rendering pipelines and Flash doesn’t use these.

Tags: 3d, cool, eDimensional, games, gaming, glasses, review, stereo

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 5:51 pm and is filed under games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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