Virtual & Augmented Reality and 3D - Page 156

Rumors are fun things, at times you can picture them happening and being a great jump forward for a product, company, etc. At other times they are just plain silly.

This is exactly where the rumor that Microsoft will be putting in stereoscopic 3D support into next generation Xboxs fits. The rumor says that the next Xbox 360 will have Natal motion sensing technology but that the Xbox 720 will not only have Natal but those cheap and cheesy 3d glasses you see at movies.

It then goes on to say that the new Xbox 720 won't start shipping until 3D HD TV support is more wide spread. This means that in 4-5 years Microsoft would be putting in support for a 3D technology that is outdated today.

Read more here.

Ok time for one last round of iPhone rumors before the end of my day. It seems that there is a lot of speculation on what Apple will bring forth onto the world at WWDC. Much of this speculation surrounds the iconic Apple iPhone.

For months there have been rumors, fake shots, blurry cams, everything you can imagine but as we get closer to the time when the announcements should be dropping we hear some good ones.

The latest is that the new iPhone will have a 3D Graphics Chip in it. I am not sure the purpose of this unless perhaps it is an nVidia off shoot and Cuda/OpenCL capable. At that point perhaps Apple might be looking at a way to push off some of the iPhone overhead onto the GPU.

But then again since we have heard a ton of other rumors who knows until the great bitten one gives us the details.

Read more here.

Well CES kicked off today so the news will be full of interesting products. Our first article comes from Charlie Demerjian at the Inq.

It seems that Charlie was able to get a shot of nVidia's new 3D Glasses while checking out a projection system from Samsung.

These new glasses are very cheap looking (remind me of something found on a gas station sunglass rack) and if Charlie is right won't be great performers either.


Take a look for yourself here.

nVidia is still having a rough time, Not with GPUs and MCH chips. No this time it seems they are going in the wrong direction with their newest 3D Glasses.

If you have ever tried a pair of these (not just from nVidia) they are not exactly the easiest thing on the eyes. They usually consist of a pair of glasses that are little more than small displays that alternate the image between your town eyes creating a 3D Effect. The last pair I used gave me a headache that lasted a couple of days.

According to Charlie Demerjian; nVidia is using a similar technology to the migraine inducing ones I remember. The Green team are choosing this technology at a time when everyone else is moving away from active glasses for that very reason.

Read more at The Inquirer.

There's a lot of popular well known mods used to glamour up the look of a PC enclosure such as adding side windows, lighting, uv cabling etc. and sometimes you'll even see people go the full hog, converting old VHS recorders or boom boxes, radios etc. into PCs.

But what you certainly don't see every day (and I believe this is a first of its kind), is this number :-

AMD has today resurrected the once highly popular All-in-Wonder lineup of hybrid solutions. The new card is simply dubbed the All-in-Wonder HD; the first ATI based graphics card ever with HD tuner support embedded.

The graphics card itself is based around the 55nm Radeon HD 3650 with 120 Stream processors, a 128-bit DDR2 memory interface, DirectX 10.1 support and a unified video decoder for HD video decoding at the hardware level.

The tuner implementation comprises support for analog TV, free-to-air HDTV and ClearQAM unencrypted cable. Furthermore, there is the added benefit of hardware MPEG-2 encoding.

As far as the I/O goes; we see the inclusion of both DVI and HDMI outputs as well as a daughter card with S-Video, stereo-in and component video connectivity; this making it an ideal partner for HTPCs. Word has it we will first see these new cards appear from partners Diamond and VisionTek by late July at an RRP of $199 US.

Primarily aimed at DVR users with full compatibility for Motorola's eSATA equipped HD digital video recorder/set-top portfolio, Seagate has just announced a 1 Terabyte External DVR Drive as part of their new Showcase Video Library series. This unit allows consumers to be able to record up to 200 additional hours of HD movies or 1,000 hours of standard definition content via USB2.0 or eSATA connectivity.

Seagate is working with Motorola, the leader in digital set-tops with over 73 million shipped, to deliver external storage solutions for DVRs. By connecting a Seagate Showcase product with its included eSATA cable, the capacity of these DVRs can instantly be increased - eliminating the need to delete your favorite movies or shows. The 1TB Seagate Showcase drive can be seen exclusively in the Motorola booth # 1405 during The Cable Show '08 at the Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.

For full details on the 1TB external DVR solution and Showcase series, head over to this section on Seagate's website.

At Computex earlier this year Zalman was showing its upcoming 3D displays and they've finally launched them. We're looking at a 19 and a 22-incher and we're not sure if Zalman has come up with Trimon name as a play on Trinitron or Pokemon. Either which way, these new 3D display requires you to wear a pair of glasses for them to work and you need to use an Nvidia graphics card.

You might wonder about the latter requirement and the answer is simple, Zalman relies on Nvidia's 3D stereoscopic driver, which is flaky at best. At least the glasses you get with the Zalman displays look more like a pair of naff shades than something really nerdy as early types of stereoscopic glasses with LCD shutters used to be like.

Club 3D has announced the availability of its HD2900 GT Heatpipe graphics card and the specs aren't far off from what we reported on here. The specifications don't differ significantly from what we already knew and the Club 3D card looks very much like a reference card with a sticker on it. None the less, the Radeon HD2900 GT is here.

As we mentioned, the GPU is clocked at 600MHz and it's based on the ATI R600 GPU. It has 240 stream processors and a 256-bit memory interface. It's of course a 256MB card and the GDDR3 memory is again as we told you earlier, clocked at 800MHz or 1,600MHz effectively.