First Look At Acer's 3D Laptop 151
Barence writes "Acer today revealed the world’s first 3D laptop, the Acer Aspire 5738PG, which will launch alongside Windows 7 on October 22. It uses a combination of software and specially coated glass on the 15.4in screen, along with a standard set of polarised glasses. Initial impressions were a bit iffy, and whether anyone actually needs a 3D laptop is another question entirely, but we'll find out this month."
Games (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder whats the use for 3D laptop, and if this works better than the existing tech?
NVIDIA 3D Vision [nvidia.com] is great with some games, but laptops aren't usually used for that and you would probably want atleast 17" screen if you'd get it for gaming. So whats the use?
3D = Novelty Technology? (Score:3, Interesting)
I do 3D modelling, and I'd love to do it at the beach.
Otherwise, gaming in 3D would be fun.
Novelty technology? Okay, maybe for most folks at this time.
Pointless and stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
This is pointless and stupid : here's why.
First of all, 3d gaming requires some serious tinkering. It's still a very immature, rare technology that works best with better displays than you can fit into a laptop. Right now, the DLP HDTVs that support 3d are the best available display with the least amount of ghosting.
Second, rendering 2 viewpoints puts far more load on the GPU than rendering just one. You need the fastest available single GPU nvidia graphics card in order to play recent games. It has to be single GPU because so far nvidia drivers don't support 3d and SLI at the same time. It has to be nvidia because only nvidia currently offers 3d drivers. There's a way to get 3d on an ATI card but it's limited.
Gaming on a laptop is already a bad bargain, 3d gaming is even worse.
Without all that said : I think 3d gaming is freakin' awesome. I even built myself a custom planar display a couple years ago in order to play games in 3d.
why would anyone need a 3d laptop? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Games (Score:2, Interesting)
Build it and they will come.
Just because we don't know what the uses are, doesn't mean it's useless.
Not "3d": *stereo* (Score:5, Interesting)
A 3D display produces a 3D representation; that is, if you change your angle of view, what you see changes accordingly. Likewise, if the display is turned 180 degrees, you'd be looking at the back of the scene being displayed.
Stereo displays provide a fixed perspective generated by providing two single-angle images of a scene that are designed to replicate the angles your eyes would achieve from the (single, unchangeable) desired vantage point. Moving your head will not reveal other portions of the scene in any way, nor will moving the display.
Stereo image technologies can become 3D when they use the actual angle of view of your eyes and change the stereo angle appropriately. This requires far more interaction with your eyes and physical orientation, not to mention actual 3D media to display. A half-measure most of us are familiar with can be observed in a game like Mechwarrior (XBox), where you can change your angle on the scene by moving your mech's position or rotating its turret; here, we have the 3D media that is required, but we still don't have the eye and body tracking that would give you the sense that you're looking at something in full 3D.
There's a huge push right now to get the public to call stereo, "3D." As proper geeks, we should resist this strongly, not only as a matter of incorrect (highly exaggerated) terminology, but to make it clear that there is a long way to go yet before we actually get 3D displays, and that we're interested in getting them.
Quite aside from the issue that until or unless we're all normally wearing display capable contacts or something similar that conveniently and as a matter of course feeds us dual images, the entire "here, put these glasses on" approach is a sorry mess. No matter what technology the glasses use.
Re:Games (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder whatever happened to this, circa 2002:
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1040-978499.html [cnet.com]
No glasses required. I think some other big company did the same thing.