OLED 3d googles from emagin. Here’s the quick scoop. 3d googles have never taken off. Lots of companies tried to jump on the bandwagon mid 90s in reaction to the term virtual reality, which in itself never really took off. Maybe in a reaction to lawnmower man, I dunno. Lawnmower man was in 1992? Man, I’m getting old.

There have been lots of googles in the past. There have been all sorts of little tricks to pull off the 3d effect. There are pairs that use red/blue tricks, you put on old-skool 60s style red/blue glasses and a driver makes your CRT red/blue to create the effect. There have been grayish glasses that pull of this effect with sort of polarized lenses. Nvidia (since the 67 driver releases) have been supporting 3d stereo drivers for XP to ease this process.

More tech

Ok so, there’s a few things these glasses can do:

• Make you look stupid – ok this isn’t a date, so just ignore that
• Make a 3d model (opengl etc) really look 3d. Not just some flat image. 3d googles can integrate with the display driver to really go deep into the 3d stack (opengl, dx) to create a real-time “magic eye” effect. I’ve never seen it but I’ve read it creates real looking depth.
• Read your head movement. The reviews say it acts like a mouse, so you can map something in a game to be your neck moving around. This might be good for a handful of games, the rest, eh. It would take practice. Neat though.
• It’s all USB. One cable.
• It has headphones and a mic for input and output of sound. IE: voice chat and headphones
• Creates a 105″ screen in your face using OLEDs
• It’s way too expensive. $900. What.

Their site

If you go to their site you can see a demo of them. Well, it’s sort of a demo. It’s more like watching a guy where sunglasses and be magically transported off to magical lands of 1st-person action and race driving. Counter-Strike is the first game they show. Woot.

They have a great FAQ section. I can understand why. There’s lots of questions I have even beyond the ones that they have listed there.

Verdict

Honestly, I was looking around online just last week wondering where all this 3d glasses stuff has left off. A lot of the products really didn’t deliver (except headaches) and it’s uncanny to see these come out.

In the video a guy comes home in a button-down shirt and plays. Obviously, they are marketing to people like me. People who want to decompress after a day’s work but have too much expendable income. :) What.

Here’s what I’m waiting on:

• You have to run nvidia’s 3d driver with the same graphics card driver version. The 3d version is 78.xx and the graphics driver I’m using is 81.xx. They are a bit behind on the 3d bit. Probably because no decent glasses have been in demand. So boo.
• $900. Maybe tax season will be good.
• More reviews. Maybe I could see them in person. I want to know if they cause headaches.
• No DVI connector? Just VGA? Hmm. I have dual DVI so I guess I could just adapt one.

$900. Ah screw it. I’d rather get a intel mac mini that I don’t need. :P