According to X3D Technologies the X3D System "unlocks the potential to add true, life-like 3-Dimentional experiences on your CRT PC screen." When I read that statement, I had to experience this for myself. I have always enjoyed playing PC games and with the ever-increasing sophistication of video cards, software, and AI; the games are becoming eerily realistic. What better way to increase my pleasure than to add the extraordinary effect of true 3D to my favorite games.

I am sure most of us have, at least tangentially, been aware of various vendors promising to enhance our viewing pleasure by the addition of a 3rd dimension to our gaming, movies, and images. We have undoubtedly also heard the horror stories of how the product failed miserably or caused unbearable headaches after only a few minutes of use. Those factors were the cause of apprehension and excitement for me when I decided to test the X3D System. I wanted to see if the ability to transform our mundane world into one bursting with life was feasible without forcing us to break out the aspirin.

As is customary, I won't perform the ol' cut and paste of all the details but I will include some of the highlights. If you wish to see a more detailed description you can check them out yourself at X3D.

You will need DirectX 8.1 or higher and a video card capable of 3D gaming. I wouldn't recommend most on-board video, although the new N-force boards should suffice. In fact, the included installation/viewing guides state "Any X3D Viewing System can be used for 3D gaming provided your system meets 3D gaming requirements and 3D drivers are installed." A nice little blurb on the box, and pretty much all over the documentation, says you must have an NVIDIA graphics accelerator for 3D gaming. I had no trouble running it under my ATI 9500 Pro. Go figure. Included in the package are the glasses (and transmitter if wireless), dongle, installation cd, and game cd's.

Installation is fairly simple. Included in the package is a video dongle that is used to connect the glasses to your PC. One end sports a VGA connector for attaching to your video card; the other end has a port for the wired glasses, VGA monitor connection, and wireless glasses transmitter. First and foremost, turn off you PC and power down your monitor. Then disconnect your monitor from your PC and connect it to the dongle. Next, connect the glasses or transmitter to the other end of the dongle and connect the dongle to your PC VGA connection. Finally, turn on your PC and monitor, that's it you are done.

Time for the software/drivers. Once you're are up and running, insert the included CD. The software consists of the Desktop Controller (used to adjust settings), TV Gateway (capture card required), PC Gateway (for viewing streaming windows media in 3D), Image Conversion Utility (w/Photoshop allows you to convert your images to 3D) and NVIDIA video and stereo drivers. When I went through the installation I didn't have any trouble other than a warning message saying there were no drivers to install. I thought I may have gotten a bad disk until I realized that my current ATI drivers were sufficient and it was actually telling me there was no need to install other drivers. A slight modification to the wording of this message may alleviate some confusion.

Operation
Now that we have all the software installed, let's get to the fun part, testing. As mentioned above, the package includes several 3D games. A list is below:

There are a lot of games included, but most of them are aimed at children. Of the rest, I would say that Paintball is absolutely horrible. Not fun, not visually exciting, just not good. I understand the inclusion was to show off the 3D capabilities of the glasses, but they should have either put more time into it or just left it out. Roller Coaster World and X3D Model Trains were pretty nice simulations and I enjoyed them most.

So, discarding the quality of the games, how does the system measure up to the hype? In a word, fair. There was definitely a difference in playing the game non-3D versus 3D enhanced, but on most games there was not enough of a difference to truly make me believe I was watching a 3D world. The quality of the 3D animation ranged from poor (Paintball) to interesting (Roller Coaster/Trains). To be fair, I was only running at 100Hz refresh rate and I think the quality would improve with a higher rate. The rub is that the system is touted as being able to run as low as 85 Hz. I tried it at 85 Hz and it was horrendous. The images flickered so bad that I was unable to read any text and made gaming impossible. I tried it at resolutions from 800x600 to 1280x768. It seemed to react better to 800x600.

The PC Gateway worked in a similar fashion, but only in 16 bit mode. It does not run in 32 bit. Quality was comparable to my experience with Roller Coaster, so that's a plus. The TV Gateway required a capture card and I don't have one so I can't comment on that portion, although I don't expect to see much variation from the rest of the package. The conversion utility works just fine and produced 3D images that I would say are almost as good as Xara 3D. The only problem with the conversion utility is that it requires Photoshop to run and not everyone can afford it at ~$600.

The desktop controller was easy to use, simply point and click on the options you wish to use. You can turn the glasses on and off, adjust from normal to reverse stereo, choose interleaved, over/under or page flip mode and test your settings.

Misc.

You may be asking, "Where can I find 3D content in order to use my glasses?" Well, you can surf on over to the X3D homepage and view their image gallery. There are no videos but there is a small sampling of 3D images. Some of the images only displayed the familiar red "x" for missing links, but the shark mouth is a nice one. Also, the recent chess match between Kasparov and X3D Fritz can be viewed.I also tried using the glasses on other games that were not already 3D enhanced like UT2K3, Frag-Ops (drool), Spiderman, GTA III, solitaire (what the heck) and checkers. I didn't notice any 3D effect in checkers or solitaire (darn!) but I could tell a difference in the rest. Spiderman was just plain ugly as was GTA III. Frag-Ops and UT2K3 actually looked very cool although the 3D effect was just noticeable. It made it difficult in some areas to orient myself but it is something I will make adjustments to and hopefully be able to use in the future.

Let's get down to the bottom line. Should you purchase it? That's hard to say. There aren't a lot of games designed for 3D right now that I would consider enjoyable for extended periods of time, but you can still find uses like the PC gateway, TV Gateway, and image conversion. Also, as I mentioned above, even though games may not be 3D games, per se, they can still be fun with the glasses. One thing in favor of the glasses I should mention is that they are only a small portion of X3D technology and application. I urge you to visit the homepage and discover for yourself the possibilities. In the end I can't say I recommend spending $100 or so until there are more applications readily available. It's an interesting concept and I think it will be more mainstream in the near future, just not right now. Of course, that's just my opinion, your mileage may vary.