Customer Reviews

eDimensional 3DGLASSES New and Improved Wired 3D Glasses System for PC

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

These ed glasses are meant to give the illusion of motion parallax and focus depth. The result is that games are more 3d than they otherwise would be, mainly from the sense of depth that is added.
These work by taking your game, which is rendered in frames, and splitting the image so that one frame is offset compared to the other. These frames are rendered in a specific order, which the glasses are synced too.
The ED glasses are basically like single pixel lcd's, where one eye piece is can close, blocking all light, or open, allowing all light. Every frame, one eye is blocked out, while the other is shown, this pattern alternates between each eye. This is so one eye only sees its particular angle, and the result is a parallax illusion is created.
Now, the reason i just gave that explanation is that you need to know how they work in order to understand the following points.
Because each eye is blanked out every other frame, your light output, and frame rate is effectively cut in half. So a 60 hz refresh rate display will run at 30 hz with the glasses. I have found this to be quite tolerable, but apparently others do not fair so well with such a low refresh rate. So, be warned that you either need to tolerate lower refresh rates and its accompanying flicker, or you need to make sure you display has a high enough refresh rate that when you do use the glasses you won't see any (120 hz base refresh cut in half is 60 hz, which is quite tolerable for most). Along with this, the glasses don't work well with odd numbered refresh rates, like 75 hz. I believe this is because the glasses evenly split frames between each eye, and most humans have two eyes, of which 75 hz cannot evenly split into 2. So be aware that if your display does support higher refresh rates that they are not odd numbered.
Another biggie is that because these glasses work on the same principle as most lcd monitors, they are not likely to work with lcd monitors. Without getting into physics too much, lcd's work off of polarizing light into a single state,and since the light coming out of an lcd monitor is already polarized, the passive polarizers are bound to negatively interact with the already polarized light. So, this may result in the glasses always appearing blanked out, not allowing you to see the monitor, or may result in ghosting.
Because of this i recommend only using these glasses with non-polarized based display technology. Examples would be plasmas, CRT's, DLP's...etc. I've effectively used the glasses with two dlp projectors, and have had no troubles.
The last point, is that, yes driver support sucks! I believe Nvidia is purposefully ruining support for these glasses to make room for their own brand that they are releasing. If you have a moderately new video card, as most gamers are bound too, you will probably find the glasses don't work. One solution is ED's drivers, however these are software based and kill performance!
But, don't worry, i work around i've found fixes the problem. There is a company who manufactures their own lcd monitor (special designed to work with polarizers mind you), and they also have developed their own drivers. This company is called IZ3D, and you can go to their site and download their drivers, which include generic support for shutter glasses. Then you must go to ED's site and download the manual activator, meant only for "testing." What you can do is manually activate the ED glasses using the activator and use "pageflip" mode. Then configure the IZ3D drivers to work in shutter mode, and there you have it.
Bottom line, the glasses are a nice idea, but lack support terribly. If you're willing there are workarounds though.

I bought these to work with GTR and FS2004. Both games are stunning in 3D. The setup requires some tweaking. I am running a Dell XPS P4 3.8Gig, nVidia 6800GTO, 1Gig RAM, dual Raptor setup, so there are no frame rate issues. They do indicate you may have to scale back the graphics on lower powered systems. I could not detect any loss of sharpness with the glasses. The darker the room, the better they work. nVidia cards have built in 3D drivers. The demo with the nVidia logo floating out of the monitor is incredible. My display is a 19" Sony 420GS running at an 100Hz refresh rate.

I bought a pair of these recently, the drivers do not work with newer nvidia cards at all, they just cause games to crash on startup for the most part.

I'm giving them 3 stars only because they work so well on older 6000 and 7000 series cards, looks like people with newer systems have to wait for the Nvidia 3d system coming out this year.

I still haven't been able to get these glasses to work yet. I am guessing that hardware incompatibilities are my problem. Is there a detailed list of hardware needed for these glasses to work? If so could someone please email me a copy. At norwoddm03@gmail.com

Thanks! Sincerely,

Mark N 05/22/2011

I looked into these 3D glasses as a nice alternative to the headache-inducing anaglyph ones I had been using previously. To the greater extent, they were just that. The software that comes with these glasses is rather nice as well and the 3D drivers worked where some others wouldn't.

Unfortunately there were some issues overall with the product. The product specs say it works on "virtually any flat-panel display". My PC setup is a very modern one, including an LCD monitor that has a resolution of 1920x1080. The hardware for these glasses dislike resolutions over 1024x768 (I had it working as high as 1366x768). And while the 3D effect was better overall than anaglyph and less of a headache, the headache is not eliminated... The flashing of the LCD lenses in the glasses will do it eventually. Takes some getting used to. Finally, the software mentions "NO LAPTOP SCREENS". I thought, 'Ok, I'll just use an external monitor, no problems.' Just so you guys are aware, that did not work well and caused some problems that had to be cleared (confused the Windows OS as to where the real monitor was). I registered the software from that machine (laptop) and need to move it to a new desktop PC that I built, but it has some do0fy DRM thing that requires the help of a technician over the phone to resolve. (Which I have not done yet, BTW.) Also, I have tested it on the desktop system. The monitor is just too large. I don't feel like decimating my screen resolution to view HD graphics in non-HD 3D.

I like the fact that this works on an LCD display. But it is a little behind, technology-wise, to be paying close to $100 for.

These were very easy to set up but they did not work. I have a 21" LCD monitor and I am running Windows XP. I tried to get them to work with MS Flight Simulator X but they did not work at all. I tried every trick they showed in the owners manual to no avail. I even contacted their customer service who provided me with very general tips which, big surprise, did not work. They said a game called "Freelancer" would work but I downloaded it and it did not work either. I would definitely not recommend these glasses to anyone.