VRJoy

Gadgeteer Hands On Review by Julie

December 02, 1999

VRJoy are LCD shutter glasses that transform images, movies and games into stereoscopic 3D.  These glasses will work with any computer that uses a CRT monitor. They will also work with any operating system. There isn't any software that you have to install to use these glasses if you just want to view images, or movies in stereoscopic 3D. If you want to play games in 3D, that is a different matter. I'll talk more about that later. 

The glasses are black plastic goggles that you can wear over regular eye glasses if necessary. They are pretty light weight and the construction is fine. Wearing the glasses isn't the most comfortable thing in the world, but they aren't too bad. I wear regular glasses and found that the VRJoy glasses pressed down on the top of my frames causing them to press into my nose more than usual. The glasses do have a removable nose piece. The ear pieces on the shudder glasses press into the side of your head instead of resting on your ears.

A nice thing about these glasses is that you don't have to open up your computer in order to install them. They have a cord with a connector that plugs into a small module. This module in turn is powered by an AC adapter and also has another adapter that connects to your video card's monitor output. This adapter has a pass thru connection that allows you to plug your monitor into it. So, setting things up was just a matter of unplugging the monitor from the video card in back of my computer, plugging in the pass thru adapter into the video card, plugging in the monitor cable into the back of the pass thru adapter, and plugging in the AC Adapter. Whew! You can leave the glasses plugged in all the time and still use your computer/monitor as usual. When you want to use the glasses, you just press the Power button on the VRJoy module.

Ok, how do the glasses actually work? Well, the module when powered on, switches your monitor into interlaced mode. When a monitor is in "interlace" mode, all of the odd numbered lines are painted on one refresh of the screen and all of the even numbered lines are painted on the next refresh. When you look thru the VRJoy glasses, the image for one eye is displayed on the odd numbered lines, while the image for the other eye is displayed on the even numbered ones. The shutter glasses have two LCD panels in them (one for each eye). They synchronize with the interlaced monitor so each eye only gets to see the image it's supposed to see.

The glasses come with a demo CD that has several 3D images that you can view. I'll admit that some of the images did look pretty cool thru these glasses. Some felt like the images were popping out of the screen or that there was actually space behind the objects on the screen. There are also other image gallery sites linked from the VRJoy website. I had fun looking at these images on various sites for about an hour. After the hour was over, I found that I had a slight headache and my eyes felt a bit tired. One thing that I don't like about the glasses is that you feel like you're wearing sunglasses. They cut the light coming in by about half. So, sometimes it feels like you have to strain to see things.  I did find that one person's perception of 3D is not the same as another person's. I found on of the demo pictures to be a particularly good one as far as 'feeling' like it was in 3D. I asked my friend to look at it and she could not tell the difference between the picture with the glasses turned on or off. I thought that was very strange but then she told me that she has very little depth perception. 

As far as watching 3D movies, I was not able to test this function because I didn't have access to any movies during my review period. However, you can order movies directly from the VRJoy website.  They also sell a device that you can attach to your camcorder that allows you to create your own 3D movies. The bad news is that this accessory is priced at $359. 

Now the reason I was most interested in the VRJoy glasses was for game playing. In order to play games in 3D, you must run a driver program (included on the CD) called VRCaddy. This driver only runs under Windows 95 or 98. The gotcha is that the driver only works with a few video cards (of which mine was not included - Diamond Fire GL Pro). The video cards that VRCaddy does support are:

Diamond Viper770(including Ultra)
ATI Rage 128 Family(including Rage Fury)
Matrox G400
Canopus Spectra 2500
Creative Labs 3D Blaster Banshee
Creative Labs Graphic Blaster TNT
Creative Labs 3D Blaster Savage 4
ELSA Winner II
Voodoo3 cards by 3DFX

Once you run this driver, your are supposed to be able to play most OpenGL or Direct3D (5.0 or higher) games in stereoscopic 3D. Check the supported game page on VRJoy's website for specific game info.

I was really disappointed that I wasn't able to test the glasses with the game demos that came on the included CD.  For about $80, I'm not sure that VRJoy is worth it unless you have a video card that it supports for game playing. Looking at 3D pictures is fun, but only for about an hour. 

Price: $79.95

Pros:
Will work with any computer / CRT monitor.
Don't have to open your PC to set it up.

Cons:
In order to play games in 3D, you need a supported video card.