New More Affordable Wired 3D Vision Active Shutter Glasses Are Coming

Nvidia has announced a new more affordable model of the 3D Vision active shutter glasses that will be wired as opposed to the currently available wireless infrared version of the glasses and the wireless RF Pro version of 3D Vision. The new 3D Vision Wired glasses are going to cost $99 USD and they are expected to be available by the end of June, so don’t start looking for them yet if you are tempted by the lower price. In this new model Nvidia ditched the battery and the wireless communication, so now they connect directly to a PC’s USB port, meaning that there should be no more problem with synchronization or interferences if using more pairs of glasses in the same room. You can also forget about having to recharge a battery or about getting the battery dead after about an year or two of extensive use or actually I should call it extensive abuse…

Of course these glasses are not going to replace the wireless models, they are just going to go along with them for people that don’t mind wearing glasses that are wired to the PC, wanting more affordable solution (the wireless IR 3D Vision kit now costs $149 USD after the recent adjustment of the price from $199 USD). The wired 3D Vision glasses seem to be a great solution for work environments where you have multiple systems using 3D Vision or for LAN parties for example, not that you cannot also use them at home, but with the recent wave of 3D laptops and 3D monitors with integrated IR emitters for personal use you might just want to get an extra infrared wireless pair of glasses only for $99 USD.

The new wired 3D Vision active shutter glasses use the same shutters and are compatible with the same hardware as the wireless glasses (there seem to be just some design improvements implemented in the frames) and I suppose you should not have any trouble using them both at the same time on one system (this needs to be confirmed). Of course there should be an official driver update to add the support for the wired 3D glasses as well, so we should be getting that probably in the next WHQL driver sometime in June. The new wired 3D glasses are going to be coming with 10 foot long USB cable (around 3 meters) that should be enough to cover the need of most people using a 3D monitor, although the length of the cable might be a bit of a problem for people using 3D DLP projector setups, so for that the wireless glasses might still be a better and more flexible choice. And I hope to soon be able to try a pair of the new wired 3D Vision shutter glasses and report back, although I’m expecting no surprises here, especially considering the LC shutters and the electronics driving them should be performing pretty much the same as on the wireless version.