What are your specs? Keep in mind that this may cut your framerates in half because the glasses have to render two scenes.

I've heard good things about those glasses, though. I hope you enjoy them!

-Wheatevo

Yea as soon as I get them I'll report the results back here. I'm expecting good results but you never know. I have a decent system (Athalon XP 2200, 1/2 gig of ram, Geforce 3) so I should be fine with the frame rates.

I use a similar set of 3D glasses that I got a year or two ago. It had been a while since I used them so I had to retrain my eyes. The game is fantastic with the glasses, especially with as many of the status windows closed (when flying) as possible. As always, it took a little while to figure out where to aim in relation to the targetting reticule.

I run the game @ 1024x768x32 with a refresh rate of 140Hz (effectively 70Hz per eye) and it's smooth and 3D. Asteroid fields rock!

Where can I get these glasses from? What other games do they work with? and How much do they cost?

P.S. I live in England so if its an American company they need to ship internationally.

Hellalive rules!

Yeah tell us same stuff as assassin.

If you want to read up on them here is the web site:

http://www.edimensional.com/Merchant2/a ... imensional

And I'm not 100% sure but I think they are a British company. I first heard of them on several BF1942 sites which posted good reviews.

Edited by - Bargib on 08-04-2003 08:56:00

Thanks dude. Looks interesting but what do all of you think about it and what other games have you used it with?

Hellalive rules!

One big warning: There is a good chance that you'll spend a lot of time setting up the glasses initially. I'm not talking hours, I'm talking days. Partly because you'll have to wait for e-mail replies from tech support. Once you get them working, you're not necessarily out of the woods. Each game will require it's own amount of set up, and some of the games just don't work well with the glasses. Targeting reticles are a big problem, as one guy here noted, but menus, text, and mouse pointers are often hampered, too.

When it works, it works well, but I don't know that all the hassle is worth it. Before you ever buy them, also consider your monitor. It's recommended that your monitor have a minimum refresh rate of 85. That will typically limit you to lower resolutions on the more common monitors.

I have my glasses hooked up to my computer, but I've yet to actually put them on for this game. The time spent getting them working makes me gun shy of actually using them.

OK, here is my review (as I spent all weekend "testing" them. :G

Setup: Very easy and making adjustments very easy. A combination of ctrl -F3, F4, F5, and F6 will quickly adjust it any way you want it.
Results: Depth perception is incredible (I also spent a lot of time testing other games such as BF1942, and Jedi Knight 2. Let me tell you that jumping across the ledges and across the trash carriers in the 3rd level of JK2 was scary. Also the light saber battles are just too cool to describe. Even the cut seems are in 3D and it looks like you are sitting in the back of the ship watching the hologram of Mon Monthma.

In Freelancer the ships, planets, asteroids, and star fields just come to life. This next part works best in a mostly dark room. I was able to tweak the settings to where in 3rd person view my Saber was literally floating outside the monitor in thin air. It looked like a semi-transparent model space ship floating in mid air. You could see every detail from the turrets moving as you moved your view around the ship to the little guy sitting in the cockpit. It looked exactly like those 3d holograms you see projected in the movies (like star wars/star trek). Again it was just too cool for words and is something you must see yourself.

Overall, the glasses are very comfortable and don't cause eye strain (although if you look off screen toward the TV and they are still in infra red range the shutter effect is a bit harsh so you have to take them off before you look else where). It was very easy to set up; I didn't even turn off the computer when I attached the dongle between the monitor and computer.

I also loaded up Star Wars: Pod Racer and I have to say that it makes this mediocre game actually fun to play. I actually got a headache from getting tense while trying to maneuver at full speed through caves. It really gives you the sensation of speed. I can only imagine what it would be like with a really good racing game.

Cons:

If you are running Windows XP then you must have a Nvida card to use the glasses...not to much of a problem for me since my computer does have a Geforce 3 but I wanted to put it on my sons computer which has a ATI Radeon 7500 all in wonder that I use for video capture.

As mentioned in the previous post it does not work well with 2d menus/aiming cross hairs. When I had it tweaked to where my ship was outside the screen the menus/aiming cross hairs were completely unusable. As a matter off fact I couldn't even see my cross hair anymore. Now that said you can still tweak the settings so that the environment looks 3D without messing up your menus. You still have depth perception and it looks very good..you just don't have stuff floating outside the screen.

Final conclusion:

These glasses are more than worth the price for any serious gamer (or someone who really wants to WOW their kids :g ) If I had it to do over though I might have gone with the wired version because the battery life is supposed to be around 120 hours. Guess I'll have to buy in bulk... In FPS games the cross hair will never be exactly where you are shooting but with a little practice this becomes a non issue. I am really disappointed (sp?) that it messes up the 2D menus because it would be slick fighting in turret view with a freighter. However, due to this being a relatively new gaming product is just has not been adapted for yet by game designers. I suspect as people see just how amazing these things are they will become popular and in a year or two we will start to see DEVS designing games with 3D support.


Edited by - Sinclare on 25-03-2003 00:31:54

Edited by - Sinclare on 25-03-2003 00:33:01

I saw these at a kiosk once for about $60 but they had a wicked return policy (something like 3 days for exchange only, no cash refunds). So some people must not like them. They seemed to work pretty well on that cheesy episode 1 pod racing game though.

OK,

Looking at the site, I will admit I will probably buy one of these. My girlfriend already gets motion sick trying to follow when i'm dogfighting in debris fields, this should put it over the top to put these on her.

My question is when/if they would ever consider making a driver to allow thier head monitoring based controller control your targeting while your mouse controlled your flight, all the evasive fun of free flight, with all the targeting fun of turret view.. Imagine the vertigo!!!!!

Oh man.. combine those things with my parents' 7 foot projection screen and I think I might wet myself playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein.. Freelancer would be awesome as well.

That could be something to look forward to this summer

Well I'm convinced, I've got a NVidia and I probably won't get anything else for a while by which time they'll probably have fixed that problem. Now, the glasses or lots of music...

Hellalive rules!

I once bought a similar system: 3D-Revelator from Elsa

I think those shutter glasses are all alike, since thy all work with the same principle. Therefore let me warn you and add a few cons:

- Framerate "feeling" is dropped by 50%, since the pc has to render one image for each eye, e.g. a game which seemed fluently with 30fps w/o glasses will look ****y with just 15fps per eye

- Several games have serious problems with such glasses, like no cursor, no menu, effects or objects incorrectly placed in the gameworld, etc...

- The worst thing, which caused me to stop using my glasses is a "double image effect". If you are looking at a screen, each eye will not only see its image, but also a faded image which is intended for the other eye - which makes you see things twice. This effect becomes worse, as higher the 3D perception is and as higher the contrast between the 3d-objects is. It also causes headache after some time. I looked the web to find a solution to fix the problem, but found out that the problem is caused by the phosphor layer of my monitor. Most of todays monitors cannot switch the image completely 120 or more times per second - each image needs a few microseconds to fade away. Some monitors seem to use a faster kind of phosphor which is more expensive and therefor used rarely. In conclusion you should be careful before buying some glasses and perhaps borrow some to test them if you have a good monitor or if you can stand the effect.

-Maniac007