3D- as in Stereo

I've been somewhat facinated with Stereo images for a long time, I owned one of the very first vomit inducing entertainment oriented VR headsets. Although I'll admit I didn't pay the $1000's the manufacturer originally asked for it.

With the sudden resurgence of 3D at CES, I started looking at NVidia's shutter glasses solution. NVidia came in and demo'd an early prototype of the Viewsonic monitor while I was working on Spore. I can go buy a 22 inch 120Hz Viewsonic monitor with the glasses for about $400, which doesn't seem unreasonable. I can buy the monitor alone for about $250 which is competitive with other 2 inch monitors. Then I looked at the price of a second set of glasses (just the glasses not the transmitter), $150 for an additional pair of shutter glasses seems obscene to me.

With HDMI 1.4 and the sudden popularity of 3D at CES, I suspect it won't be long before most panels are 120Hz and support input signals at that rate, so the cost of entry is going to be the cost of the N-Vision kit, NVidia needs to get the price down.

I'm a big fan of surround gaming, it really does add a lot more to games than you might first expect. I use a Matrox Tripple Head To Go (I wouldn't recomend it), and I've been considering "upgrading" (not sure it would actually be faster) to an ATI 5850 GPU hoping that eyefinity" resolves some of the setup pain. I must admit I'm intrigued by the 3D surround Demo NVidia did at CES, but I already own 3 24 inch monitors that I use for surround gaming, and the concept of replacing them with 3 new 22inch monitors and adding a second $300 video card is a little excessive even for me.

Stereo 3D really doesn't add much for the "hardcore" gamer, yes it's more immersive, but it usually makes it harder to play, and performance is reduced by Half because of the 2x rendering. So is it aimed at the less hard core player, if it is the cost of entry needs to drop, probably to less that $100.