HP announced a 3D PC display and a 3D PC today. To me, at least, the most interesting thing about them is that the company chose a different flavor of 3D for each device.

First the display. Its official moniker is the HP 2311gt 3D monitor, and it’s a 23″ LED-backlit display. Like most 3D movies you see in theaters, the 3D is passive, which means that its uses polarized glasses that don’t have any embedded electronics and don’t cost a lot of money. In fact, the display and two set of glasses go for $299.99, or about what you might pay for two pair of active-shutter glasses alone.

I wonder how long it’ll take until Hollywood and consumer-electronics companies conclude that the magic of 3D isn’t that magical at home, either?

I’m in Berlin for IFA, the giant conference that’s Europe’s answer to the U.S.’s Consumer Electronics Show. I’ll be writing about some of the products I learn about this week–and one of the most interesting ones so far is Sony’s HMZ-T1, a personal TV headset that lets you watch movies and TV and play games with an image projected right in front of your eyes, producing a virtual theater-like effect.

The idea isn’t new–in fact, it’s an updated take on Glasstron, which Sony introduced back in 1997. But the new version has been thoroughly updated. It’s got twin 720P OLED displays, 3D, and 5.1 channel sound. You plug the HMZ-T1 headset into a converter box that connects to your TV. A cable delivers both an image and power–the headset doesn’t have a battery, which let Sony design something that’s fairly lightweight (14.8 ounces) and comfortable given how much electronics you’re strapping to your skull.

That’s me above, playing a racing game recently. (Sony prebriefed me about the headset and let me try it out.) As you may be able to tell, I’m enjoying myself–even though I don’t consider myself a 3D fan.

Confession time: I have an impossibly wide head. Impossibly wide as in “I wear a 2XL hat, and even that can be a tad on the tight side.” And I wear wide eyeglasses, too. The HMZ-T1 can be adjusted to fit a wide variety of heads…but even expanded to its very loosest settings, it was a skosh too tight for my noggin, which meant that the 3D picture was slightly fuzzy. But if I pressed down slightly on the headset–in a way I don’t think I’d have to do if my head weren’t so freakishly humongous, or if I didn’t wear glasses–the 3D picture looked surprisingly crisp. Much better than 3D on a standard TV, in fact.

Why’d it look so neat? Well, OLED displays are apparently better suited to this idea than LCD ones. But another big point in its favor is that you’re actually looking at two separate displays, each one optimally designed to fuse into a 3D image. (It’s rather like how ViewMasters work–and they still deliver one of the best 3D effects ever invented.)

With both the active and passive 3D TV technologies used for standard 3D TV, you’re looking at one screen with two images overlaid, and the glasses are required to descramble the image. And with active glasses, tiny LCD shutters are fluttering continuously to reveal the two images, a technique which makes my eyeballs hurt just thinking about it.

The HMZ-T1 will go for $799–a price I guessed before Sony revealed it to me–and are due to show up in Sony Stores next month. Like earlier passes at this concept, it’s going to be of most interest to gizmo freaks, not the masses. But it’s the best-performing, least gimmicky video headset I’ve seen to date. Even if you’d never buy one, you might have fun donning it for an in-store demo.

(Full disclosure: I’m speaking at an IFA panel. The conference’s organizers paid for my travel here.)

The Toshiba technology uses a lenticular screen–one capable of showing two slightly different images at once, which your eyes fuse into a 3D effect. The dimensionality I saw during the demo was a bit like what you get on the Nintendo 3DS: pretty darn grainy, but with a strong 3D effect. Even more than 3D that involves funny goggles, glasses-free 3D tends to have a sweet spot–you want to look at it from one particular position–but Toshiba cleverly uses the Qosmio’s Webcam to track your face and optimize the 3D appropriately.

Glasses-free 3D laptops aren’t a new idea–Sharp had one back in 2004 that attracted a fair amount of attention and then kind of vanished. (That wasn’t surprising: the 3D hurt my eyeballs, and there was no available 3D content to speak of at the time.)

I suspect that Toshiba thinks this Qosmio will be a specialty model of interest to a smallish number of gadget fans, not a landmark product. It can play 3D Blu-Rays and convert standard movies into a fake 3D effect, but it seems unlikely that there are teeming masses of people who will want to sit through entire movies in Toshiba’s 3D effect just yet.

Still, I’m glad the company is investing energy in specs-free 3D (it’s also demonstrated a no-glasses 3D HDTV).  If 3D ever gets great–I’m not holding my breath–it’s going to be 3D that looks fabulous and doesn’t require glasses. And we won’t get there unless companies like Toshiba attempt to make it happen. What do you think the odds are that it’ll arrive in, oh, the next decade?

Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, and 3D glasses maker XpanD have announced that they’re working together to design a specification for Bluetooth-enabled 3D glasses that will be compatible with HDTVs from all the above makers. They intend to ship them in 2012, and the glasses should work with existing 3D-capable TVs as well as new ones. It’ll eliminate the current hassle of having to buy glasses made by your TV’s manufacturer, and will presumably help to drive down prices for the specs.

To which I say: GOOD! GOOD! WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?

Before Edwin Land invented the instant camera, he invented synthetic polarizers. He realized in the 1930s that one application of the technology would be 3D movies, but it wasn’t until 1952 that the idea took off–and only briefly at the time.

In its May 16th 1953 issue, the New Yorker published a story  on Polaroid’s 3D glasses and concerns over whether they were unsanitary. Polaroid had been selling instant cameras for five years at that point, but they didn’t merit a mention in the story–Land was apparently still more famous as the polarizer guy.

If you replaced the references to Polaroid with RealD and the one to Bwana Devil with, say, Thor, you could practically republish this story today. Fifty-eight years later, people are still freaking out over germy 3D glasses and figuring out ways to disinfect them.

And hey, I just learned that Polaroid Eyewear–a separate company from the current version of the Polaroid that sells photography-related stuff, but descended from the original Polaroid–is selling 3D glasses all over again.

You see, I was playing Silent Hill’s Playstation 3 version, with a pair of stereoscopic 3D glasses affixed to my head. The guy next to me was playing the Xbox 360 version in 2D. The difference in smoothness and visual fidelity was all too obvious.

This wasn’t the only example. Earlier in the day, I had a meeting with Sega to check out Sonic Generations, another game that will support 3D on the Playstation 3. As the demo began, my heart sank. Although the visuals looked fine, the reduced framerate of 3D nearly ruined the experience. Later, I found a kiosk at Sega’s booth with the 2D version on display, and again, I was much happier. The game’s producer, Takashi Iizuka, confirmed that framerates are lower in the 3D version.

It’s no secret that 3D causes a drop in performance, because each eye requires a separate image. This is especially the case in video games, which require lots of intensive graphics processing. But I never noticed the issue on Sony’s own 3D games. When I played Killzone 3 in 3D at CES last January, the game looked great, even if the 3D effect itself was somewhat distracting.

But as more publishers slap 3D onto their blockbuster games, we’re going to start seeing some unfavorable implementations, and I’ve encountered my first examples at E3 2011. I won’t judge the final products of Konami and Sega by what’s on display here, but I’m certainly not sold.

I enjoyed attending Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference on mobile technology this week. Even the two presentations that involved having to wear funny glasses as stuff in 3D was projected for us–mostly because in both cases the source for the 3D video was a smartphone, which was kind of cool.

As usual, though, my instinctive response was to bristle at the 3D for being blurry and gimmicky. I had a random thought, which I tweeted:

If all we had was 3D TV/movies/games, and someone invented 2D, it would be hailed as a breakthrough. "No glasses–and it's sharp!"—
Harry McCracken (@harrymccracken) June 02, 2011

That sentiment apparently resonated: sixty people retweeted it. And one Twitterpal alerted me to a brilliant product that had somehow escaped my attention:

@harrymccracken Already here: 2D glasses. "Allow any RealD 3D movie to be viewed as if it is a normal 2D movie". http://t.co/mHMtGR2—
Maria (@strongria) June 04, 2011

Yup! Glasses that convert 3D movies back into 2D movies–ones that use RealD’s passive 3D technology, at least–by letting only one of the two projected images through to your eyeballs.

Why not just go to a 2D screening of the same movie in the first place, and save a few bucks in the process? These are meant for people like the wife of the glasses’ creator, who get headaches at 3D movies. (I don’t, or at least I don’t think I do–it’s just that I find them fuzzy and the 3D effect usually looks like paperdolls to me. I’m not sure if that means I have some sort of problem with my vision, or am just immune to the appeal of the whole idea.)

Genius. For only $7.99. And as the site points out, nobody will even notice they’re not 3D specs!