Glasses-Free 3D Gaming Now a Reality

Toshiba has just announced that its autostereoscopic 3D laptop, the Qosmio F755 3D, is now ready for actual gaming. While glasses-free 3D in any shape or form is mostly a novelty so far, Toshiba has been bold enough to launch a Nintendo 3DS size XL–a laptop with a parallax barrier display that produces 3D imagery without the need for glasses. All of the 3D gaming laptops to date come with the usual active shutter glasses and a 120Hz display.

In theory this sounds like the ultimate solution, but it hasn’t worked out as well as everyone had hoped for. In Toshiba’s case, the main problem with the F755 3D laptop has no doubt been its complete inability to run games in 3D mode. However, the latest news is that 3D gaming should now be possible on the F755 thanks to an update distributed via Toshiba’s Service Station utility. This could definitely widen the scope of potential buyers if it’s well implemented.

Toshiba has previously stated that the company has been working with Nvidia to ensure that games are brought into the picture, but it’s been a while since the F755 was launched so there have been some doubt as to whether those plans would be coming to fruition. We’ll believe it when we see it, but allegedly “hundreds of PC games” are now playable in 3D without putting on those annoying glasses.

The 3D solution in the F755 is rather innovative: it employs facial tracking with the built-in webcam to locate your eyes and display the two different images accordingly to create the effect. It also has two native resolutions; when it runs in regular 2D mode, a separate panel with full HD 1920×1080 resolution is used, but when it switches to 3D mode it switches to a native 1366×768. This should come in handy since the GPU is rather weak. For some reason, Toshiba has opted for a GT 540M graphics card from Nvidia instead of the much more powerful GTX 560M that comes standard with the bigger models in the Qosmio lineup.

Jesper Berg
Jesper Berg

Gaming hardware enthusiast since the 80286 era.

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