3D Vision Blog

From time to time I’m getting questions about the glasses bundles with the HP Envy 17 3D and Sony Vaio F Series 3D laptops and what extra pairs of active shutter glasses should owners of these get in order to have a more flexible solution that won’t work only with the laptop, but other 3D-capable hardware as well. That is why I’ve decided to post some advice about that, but before that let me point to you the reviews of these two 3D-capable laptops that I’ve done here, so that you may learn a bit more about them if you haven’t been interested in them so far:

- Review of the HP Envy 17 3D Laptop for Stereoscopic 3D Use
- Sony VAIO F Series 3D-capable Multimedia Laptop Review

I’m starting with the HP Envy 17 3D laptop that uses a pair of glasses based on the Xpand X103 universal 3D glasses. You should have in mind however that the pair that you get with the HP laptop and extra pairs specially designed for it are only compatible with the laptop as you don’t have an option to switch the glasses to another mode so that they may work with other 3D-capable devices such as 3D HDTV. So if you plan to buy extra pair of active shutter glasses besides the one you get bundled with the laptop, you better go directly for a pair of Xpand X103 universal 3D glasses as they are perfectly compatible with the HP Envy 17 3D laptop, but will also work with pretty much any other major brand making 3D HDTVs that use infrared communication with their glasses.

If you happen to own a Sony Vaio F Series 3D laptop, then you’ve got the device with a pair of Sony’s active shutter glasses that is essentially the same as what the company uses with their range of 3D HDTVs. That simply means you can use the 3D glasses you got with the laptop with a Sony 3D HDTV without anything special required and also if you happen to own a Sony 3D HDTV you can use the glasses from the TV with the laptop. This is a good solution if you happen to own different 3D-capable Sony products or plan to have such, but what if you have another brand of 3D TV and you are considering to buy an extra pair of shutter glasses? Here you have the option again to go for the Xpand X103 universal 3D glasses that will support the Sony Vaio F Series 3D laptop as well as any 3D HDTV, Sony included of course, but you are not limited only to them. You can pretty much get any universal pair of active shutter glasses that works with Sony 3D HDTVs and it should be able to work pretty much the same way with the 3D laptop.

- You can get the Xpand X103 universal shutter glasses for less than $80…

Today XPAND has released a 3D Plugin for making 3D Presentations in Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, that is supposed to help you easily make more attractive presentations in stereoscopic 3D format. But apparently the plugin only works if you embed 3D objects in your presentations as normal 2D objects such as text or photos still remain in 2D. So no 2D to 3D conversion, meaning that you would need to work with 3D objects if you want to get the presentation to look 3D, otherwise every non-3D object will be positioned at screen depth. The plugin allows you to export the presentation in 3D format (.pp3d) that can be viewed in stereo 3D mode as well as the normal powerpoint 2D format. To view the 3D presentation you need to use the viewer that comes with the plugin, you cannot open it normally.

Here is the 3D output with the test slide that I’ve made with the severely limited trial version of the 3D plugin, the only supported 3D output format is Over/Under and on top of that half vertical resolution (squashed). If you open the test photo of the output you will notice that all the elements of the presentation are in 2D mode and only the overlayed watermark logo is in 3D format (with a bit too high separation). If you are interested you can download and test the trial version of the plugin that besides the watermark logo is also limited to 3 slides and the viewer to 3 minutes of slideshow of the presentation. For viewing a 3D presentation in steeo 3D mode you would need a 3D HDTV or a 3D Projector supporting stereoscopic 3D in Over/Under mode (option to manually switch in that mode for 3D input), but you can capture a screenshot and then preview it in a 3D photo viewer to see the effect. The plugin requires you to have Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, it will not work with older versions.

- For more information about the XPAND 3D Plugin for PowerPoint 2010…

I just got my hands on the HP Envy 17 3D laptop, the first notebook that uses AMD HD3D technology. The laptop has a Full HD screen capable of working with a 120Hz refresh rate and an AMD Radeon HD 5850 video card, along with a pair of wireless active shutter glasses that are needed for the 3D effect. And just today I’ve found out that the wireless shutter glasses that HP uses are made by Xpand as you can also see from the photo I’ve taken. The good news is that I was able to make the laptop work with both the iZ3D Driver and DDD’s TriDef 3D software. The TriDef media player also worked fine for playing 3D videos, however I had trouble making the Stereoscopic Player work with stereo 3D videos as it should normally, but hopefully it will work at a later time after some updates. The most pleasant surprise that I’ve had was from the shutter glasses as this was my first time trying a pair of shutter glasses made by Xpand. The pair that comes with the HP Envy 17 3D laptop blocks much less light as compared to the 3D Vision glasses for example, at least visually the Xpand’s lenses seem to go a tiny bit more darker when they are activated as compared to when they are not active. Of course the glasses use infrared signal for synchronization with the transmitter built into the frame of the laptop’s screen, just right from the webcam. The not so good thing about the glasses was that they seem to show a bit more crosstalk (ghosting), but the reason for that might not lie in the glasses themselves, but be also related to other things like the drivers or the LCD panel, so this needs a bit more investigation. Another thing that I should mention is that the glasses do not have a rechargeable battery, so you will have to replace the button cell battery from time to time and always having a spare would be a good idea. Also, another thing worth noting is that the glasses do not have an On/Off button, so they don’t need manual activation, but instead start working as soon as they sense an IR signal, although I’m not sure if that contributes to the faster discharge of the battery or not.

And just out of curiosity I’ve tried to have two stereo 3D systems active, one with 3D Vision and Samsung 2233RZ 3D monitor and the other was the HP Envy 17 with the Xpand glasses, and then I swapped the glasses. This means I tried to view the stereo 3D image on the Samsung with the Xpand glasses and with the 3D Vision on the HP laptop, with the glasses getting their sync signal from their original source as the infrared coming from the other solutions’ IR transmitter interferes. The Xpand glasses continued to offer very bright and clear image when active and viewing the 3D image on the Samsung monitor, and they’ve worked just fine with the only side effect of having significantly more ghosting than when using the 3D Vision, but offering much brighter image. The more ghosting is probably due to some synchronization timing difference, but if that gets tweaked it also means that it is possible to have much more clear shutter glasses and Nvidia should start thinking on updating the lenses on the 3D Vision with a newer and better ones that do not block that much light. On the other hand, the 3D Vision glasses also worked on the HP and I could see the depth of the objects displayed in 3D on the screen, but the image was significantly more darker than with the Xpand glasses making games unplayable when in darker areas.

You are welcome to ask questions about the HP Envy 17 3D laptop and you can expect more details and a review of the laptop and especially the stereo 3D capabilities an performance it offers quite soon, I hope… ;)