3D Vision hardware and accessories

Inside the box of NVIDIA’s 3D Vision kit, you’ll find the active shutter glasses, the IR emitter, a 10’ DVI to HDMI cable, 10’ USB 2.0 cable, a 6’ USB cable (for charging the glasses), 5’ 2.5mm stereo audio plug, a cloth for cleaning the glasses, and a cloth storage pouch to store them in, as well as two additional nosepieces in case the default size doesn’t fit your head.

The packaging is very high quality, which is what you’d expect after forking over $200 for a pair of 3D glasses. If you enjoyed unboxing your iPod, you’ll enjoy unboxing NVIDIA’s 3D Vision kit.


Besides the aforementioned hardware accessories, NVIDIA also includes two CDs inside the box, one driver CD, and a CD of bonus 3D content. Unfortunately there are no full games or even game demos to play, instead the bonus CD includes video demonstrations you can watch in 3D.

Here we should also mention that besides games, 3D Vision also supports 3D movies and 3D photos. NVIDIA’s website has a handful of 3D movieos you can download and watch using their stereoscopic 3D movie software, which also comes bundled with the glasses. NVIDIA says they’ll be adding more content to the site in the near future.

Another feature 3D Vision supports is 3D game trailers. With 3D game trailers, 3D Vision users can experience how games will look in stereoscopic 3D before they purchase them. NVIDIA plans to make a 3D game trailer available for every new game that gets posted on nzone.com, starting with the recently released Burnout Paradise: Ultimate box.

This is a nice feature to have, as some games look better with 3D Vision than others, but more on that later.

The hardware

The glasses themselves seem to be very well built, and look considerably better than stereoscopic glasses we’ve seen in the past. While you certainly won’t confuse them for a pair of Oakleys, you won’t feel like a complete idiot when putting them on either.

How do they feel on the face? Pretty comfortable actually. As we mentioned above, in addition to the standard nosepiece, NVIDIA provides two additional nosepieces for users with smaller or larger heads. The nosepiece itself isn’t hard plastic either, so it won’t bite at your nose during extended gaming sessions. The back of the glasses curve inward, putting a little bit of pressure on the back of your head, but it isn’t any worse than other glasses with this design.

Those of you who wear glasses will be glad to hear that 3D Vision is designed to fit comfortably over your glasses. Depending on the size of your specs, you may need to go one size higher on the nosepiece, but we didn’t have any problems with the standard configuration.


Considering their $200 price tag, durability is also an important consideration in the design of the 3D Vision glasses. The glasses seem pretty sturdy, with very little flex. To test this subject out though we did purposely drop them off the desk a few times onto slightly thicker than average carpet. Thankfully, nothing broke off and the glasses performed fine afterwards.


NVIDIA says the glasses can last up to 40 hours on a single charge, and based on what we’ve seen, we believe it. The battery NVIDIA employs also seems to hold its charge well. An LED at the top of the glasses indicates when the glasses are powered on as well as battery life; once the glasses get low on charge, the LED goes from green to red. The glasses will also power off automatically after a few minutes of inactivity in order to conserve battery. When you do need to charge them up though, it takes about 4 hours for the glasses to get a full charge. A mini-USB is located on the bottom of the glasses for charging.


Moving to the transmitter itself, the device is quite simple, with an on/off switch on the front in case you want to turn off 3D Vision. By default, 3D Vision will kick in automatically when the driver detects the game .exe being executed, and will turn everything off once you’re back at the Windows desktop, so you actually don’t need to touch the transmitter’s power button unless you specifically don’t want to play a certain game with 3D Vision (you will need to power on the glasses before gaming though).


What you will find handy though is the 3D depth slider on the back of the IR emitter. We like to call it the immersion slider, as that’s basically what it does.

As you get more familiar with the stereoscopic 3D effects from 3D Vision, you can crank up the 3D depth (immersion), giving objects an even greater 3D look. If it’s too much for your eyes and you begin to feel nauseous, you can crank the immersion down, making objects look flatter. This is honestly one of those variables that’s going to change from person-to-person, and even from one game to another, so its handy that NVIDIA provides the slider right on the emitter. If you’ve got your emitter on the other side of the room (say for instance in a home theater) and want to adjust the 3D depth on the fly, you can also use hotkeys on your keyboard to crank the immersion up or down.