After dealing with anaglyph for some time I’ve decided to fully delve into stereoscopic 3D and bring it home, so to speak.
Just by a pure coincidence the local Sony store had the official Sony 3D Display on sale from $720 to $392 so I grabbed it.

Here’s the picture of it in action:

Now, stereoscopy has been here pretty much since the 19th century but only on the brink of 21st century we finally got digital displays that could do this… good enough, I’d say.

This display in particular is active, meaning the glasses use active shutters which present a picture to only one eye at the time, doing it so rapidly you don’t even notice. Despite many people complaining on 3D to have eye strains I’ve found this particular option to be the best, I actually never had any strains at all and I did have them with anaglyph, lenticular and passive viewing methods.

The glasses are of a really curious design. First of all, they are powered through an internal battery which you have to recharge through a USB connector. That works great for me since I hate buying batteries and the recharge time is only in matter of hours, then you can run them for about a day of clean use.
Next thing you notice about them that they are really wide, you can actually see the reflection of whatever is behind you. These would be great for walking outside and you don’t even have to turn your head to have a perfect awareness of your surroundings. I have to admit I didn’t really like it because it was too distracting. If you use them in a perfectly dark room then you don’t have to worry about this.
Great thing is that they leave a lot of space between them and your face so if you wanna touch your eye for whatever reason you can do it without any obstruction.

This screen in particular was advertised as being compatible with any PC also so I gave it a try. It took me several hours to completely figure it out and make it work as it should.
The native resolution of this screen is 1080p but you only get that at 24Hz refresh rate because it can’t get more than 60Hz over an HDMI cable (for this resolution). The 60Hz would have to split in half and since the 30Hz isn’t a valid refresh rate we’re stuck with 24Hz for each eye. If you use 720p you can go for 59/60fps as normal, however. It looked awful at both resolutions but when I found a hacked driver and used it things looked up a bit. That’s right, Sony doesn’t provide an official driver for this screen and according to the various forums I’ve searched it never will.
So I tried to play some 3D videos using Cyberlink’s PowerDVD and yeah, they worked nicely. The horrible thing about it was that the program has absolutely no clue on how to approach this screen. On autodetection it kept switching to red/cyan anaglyph (?) so I had to switch it to NVIDIA 3D VISION Ready Monitor, then everything was perfect. Note that the player can only initiate the 3D effect in fullscreen play.

Having video playback figured out I moved onto games and gotta say beforehand, PC games have done much better than PS3.
First I tried Crysis 2 and though it actually worked in 3D something unexpected happened about 30 seconds into the game and the whole 3D effect switched off. I couldn’t get it back for the life of me. Then I got to know that in order to play games in stereoscopic 3D on Nvidia cards you need a program called 3DTV supplied by Nvidia which actually costs money (about $40). Without it you can forget about it.
After installing a 14-day trial I got the effect back in Crysis 2 and so I ran Witcher 2. The computer has 12GB RAM and Nvidia GTX 560 Ti so I was used to running it on ultra details. But in 3D the game slowed down so much it was unplayable. I had to go way down with details, I’m talking medium down with some additional filters turned off. Not worth it.
The next game to try out was Diablo 3 and yeah, it worked nicely. Not much of settings for 3D, though. I’d still recommend it, it looked good enough.
And I’ve saved the best for last. Starcraft 2 blew me away with it’s approach to 3D. In the options menu you can adjust the parallax and convergence while you can see the game behind the menu so you can pretty much tell what the settings do in realtime. This was so perfect because when you’re setting these things you need to see the effect right away. You don’t wanna wiggle the sliders in the menu and then having to enter the game to see what it did. No, you got it right there, so I did it and it worked. I got awesome experience with Starcraft 2 in stereoscopic 3D. Thank you, Blizzard.

Having all this experiments done I finally hooked the screen up with the PS3 and hoped that I really saved the best for last.
I couldn’t've been more wrong.
The first game I tried was Killzone 3. I loved Killzone since the first one on PS2 and loved both sequels to bits, having stated that K3 was the best fps you could find on any console (Crysis 2 stole it for PC). Excited, I turned the 3D effect on and ran the game.
What I’ve seen was horrible. Not only did it have ghosting on pretty much any effect strength but also the picture has turned for worse. It looked like 480p upscaled to 1080p. That’s how bad it was. I still don’t know why, I can only guess that the console has to render the picture twice (for each eye) and so it has to go down with details, I don’t know. But no other game on PS3 had that problem. I’ve played Uncharted 3 and Gran Turismo 5 – they didn’t have that problem. Uncharted 3 didn’t look too good in 3D, to be honest, for a reason I’m going to talk about along with GT5.
The problem with stereoscopic 3D, and that comes from a film maker, is that you have to set convergence and parallax (if possible) for every shot. But all the games use only one setting for every shot, doesn’t matter if it’s a close up or long shot, you’re still getting the same parallax and convergence. This was especially horrible in GT5 which I ended up playing in 2D because it was unbearable. One moment you were driving and it was fine but then you had those cutscenes or replays which have such horrible ghosting my eyes couldn’t even make out one object out of it. It was impossible. Now imagine that you switch shots all the time in Uncharted 3, it just can’t stay good.

I haven’t tried any blu-ray movies in 3D yet since I don’t own any but I expect it to be much better since they have real stereographers on set to make it great for the viewers. Still, I did find couple of test videos and trailers on the internet and they blew me away. I’d say this tech has future when used properly.
Edit: Just watched Avatar and Amazing Spider-Man – both native 3D movies, btw. They were awesome and this is a good reason to get a 3D screen.

So would I recommend flirting with stereoscopic 3D? It really depends. I don’t think it’s worth going for it when you’re already satisfied with a good 2D screen you got, it’s not worth extra money. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for gaming. But I would and do recommend it for movies.

By the way I wish stereoscopic 3D devices would have some way of telling where in the screen you’re looking. Even though the effect makes you believe that objects are all on different level of depth it’s not enough for a human brain to accept it. If we focus on something in a certain level of depth the objects out of that depth become blurred. Not so in 3D. So if you’re driving in GT5 and you have your car or your cockpit sharp and your HUD is also sharp it’s hard to keep believing they are on separate depth levels. It’s quite obnoxious at times.

I love this stuff. Nuff said.

And one more venture into South Korea.

Now this is HOT!

This is the music video.