Acer is ushering in a new age of 3D with their latest gaming laptop

For decades, we have had a love-hate relationship with 3D. From its earliest iterations using blue and red lenses to the 3D TV boom of the late 2000s. Unfortunately, 3D’s cool factor was always outweighed by the inconvenience of needing to wear glasses, among other technological limitations. A decade on from the Nintendo 3DS, Acer is bringing the 3rd dimension back into gaming.

Acer today announced a plethora of new gaming products, but most interestingly the Predator Helios 300 SpatialLabs Edition, a first of its kind gaming laptop which alongside all of the expected high-end hardware components of a premium gaming device, also features one of the most interesting displays ever placed on a laptop.

The SpatialLabs name refers to Acer’s new glasses-free stereoscopic 3D display technology. In many ways, it seems quite similar to the tech used for Nintendo 3DS handheld – though much more advanced of course.

The Predator Helios 300 SpatialLabs Edition comes with a 15.6 inch IPS display which is able to create a stereoscopic 3D image without the need for glasses. The 4K 60Hz display can either run in a 2D mode at 3840×2160 or its 3D mode which halves the resolution to 1920×2160 per eye, but of course, doubles the display to allow for stereoscopic 3D across all manner of media.

Acer has highlighted the fact that more than 50 games are already capable of taking advantage of this display (including God of War, Ghostrunner and Shadow of the Tomb Raider to name a few), with more support undoubtedly coming in the future (likely in both official and non-official capacities).

Interestingly, even media such as videos and photos which were never intended to be in 3D can be transformed using simulated 3D. In fact, this ability is extended to pretty much all display-related content including live video calls.

The rest of the laptop is what we'd expect from a premium gaming machine, offering a 12th Gen Intel Core i9-12900H; a laptop-grade RTX 3080; up to 32 GB of Dual-channel DDR5 4800 MHz RAM; a PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD with up to 2TB of storage and liquid metal cooling.

The idea of glasses-free 3D has always been an interesting concept and is one which unfortunately was never fully explored when it was first introduced. As such, it is exciting to see Acer not only keeping 3D alive, but continuing to push the technology forward.

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KitGuru says: What do you think of 3D? Are you interested in Acer’s new SpatialLabs technology? Are we entering a new age of 3D? Let us know your thoughts down below.

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