It seems that all my favourite digital entertainment avenues such as games, home cinema and cinema experience have suddenly gone 3D mad, and because it’s kind of interesting technology I thought it would be interesting to discuss some of these application areas, writes Dr Stuart Slater.

For the gaming aspect, it started a while ago for me with the graphics card company NVIDIA releasing some 3D glasses that needed some rather large and powerful graphics card, a fast PC, lots of Ram and a special monitor. This all seemed really expensive at the time, (and to be honest still is), but I was really interested in seeing a PC game running in 3D.

With a pretty fast PC for playing games like the World of Warcraft and Sims 3, it didn’t seem a huge jump to update the PC to display 3D by adding a graphic card, glasses and 3D screen.

It wasn’t the easiest upgrade I have ever come across, and though I have been building and upgrading PC’s for around 10 years it took me a few days to finally get the kit working under Windows 7.

As always, this process was about finding the right drivers for both glasses and graphic card, and unfortunately for me, it was fundamentally slowed down, because as it turned out, I wasn’t supposed to use the latest drivers, or the ones supplied at the time of purchase. So finally reading on the forums, and subsequently downloading older drivers as advised by NVIDIA, the system seemed to work, so I proceeded to download the Avatar Game in 3D which was supplied with the glasses. Once downloaded, the game was installed and so I slipped the glasses on, and watched in anticipation as the game started up.

I looked around to start with and everything seemed blurred as I could see overlapping images, until I realised I had to switch the glasses on, and after a brief flash the two images seemed to merge and the game changed to 3D. It felt a little odd as my eyes adjusted, but after a short time it started to appear OK. I moved around and started to play the game as I would any other, with the added bonus of seeing it in 3D.

For me I have previously only been exposed to the standard paper glasses with coloured plastic lenses that make the films I have seen look monochrome, while things jump out at me. Luckily I was glad to see that the game I was playing wasn’t in monochrome, and the game looked 3D without things jumping out at me all the time. As an example I could see a soldier in front of me and he looked like he was standing out from the screen, so I tried to grab him to realise I was a fair distance away from the screen. It is truly amazing to see and he really did look quite three dimensional.

The glasses are reasonably heavy, but were quite comfortable for me and include a few extra nose pads so I could get a better fit. They charge up via the supplied USB cable, and when they are flat you have to connect them to the PC via the cable in order to play the game. After playing for a short time I stopped to make a coffee and it was a strange sensation for me to walk around without them as I’m presuming my eyes were readjusting, but I did feel a little dizzy. The issue of dizziness and 3D content on home systems has been documented elsewhere and it’s always interesting to read.

I have to say on the small 22” display I was watching it was hard to get fully immersed as I could see lots of things around the screen going on and think it would have been better had the screen been larger.

In all, I have played the game for several hours now in 3D and I have to say that I do find the 3D addition quite compelling, and thankfully stable drawing me further into the game based storyline

Dr Stuart Slater can be contacted on IGA@wlv.ac.uk