3D: Coming to a laptop near you

The Asus G51J laptop has a bit of peripheral flicker - and that fades quickly as your eyes acclimatise - but otherwise it delivers

The laptop arrived accompanied, inevitably, by a disc of Avatar: The Game - basically, if you buy anything 3D at the moment, you'll be dreaming about blue people, as there's precious little else in the way of 3D content.

But it it all kicks off this year: Sky starts broadcasting 3D sport in April, and the first 3D Blu-rays will appear soon after, spearheaded by films full of wisecracking computer-generated animals and, of course, Avatar.

I turned on the Asus with some trepidation. I've tried so-called 3D laptops before, which add 3D e ffects to 2D games. The downside is that they give you a feeling of nausea vaguely akin to that of eating dinner on a passenger ferry in choppy seas.

The Asus has a bit of peripheral flicker - and that fades quickly as your eyes acclimatise - but otherwise it delivers. The 3D uses Nvidia's 3D Vision graphics system and active shutter glasses. These are designed with tiny blinds that cut o ff one eye at a time at a rate of 100 times a second. This creates the two separate images needed for the 3D eff ect.

The demo videos feel appropriately supercharged: logos leap at you like they might hit you in the face, and there's huge depth of field to every image. Avatar: The Game's effects are actually far more solid and over-the-top than the film's... it's just a pity that you quickly think, 'This is drivel. Are there any GOOD games for this thing?'

Nvidia's 3D Vision card lets you update lots of 2D games into 3D. Some, like Batman: Arkham Asylum, look as good as Avatar. Others wobble and flicker like there is faulty lighting. But the graphics card at least warns you politely that the game you've just loaded might well give you a blinding headache.

As a first, all-in 3D package, this is a great boy's toy - not to mention a superb techno-talking point when used in public.

At £1,699, though, your new-found popularity won't be cheap - and it will only last until the first 3D TVs appear in April.


TECH SPEC Asus G51J 3D NVIDIA 3D Vision

£1,699, asus.com

Screen 15.6in (1366x768 pixels)

Processor 1.6GHz Quad-core Intel i7

Operating system Windows 7 Premium

RAM 4GB

Graphics Nvidia 3D Vision

Hard drive 320GB


source: dailymail