digitalwanderer said:
Are there any sets of those that actually work any decent without giving you massive headaches? If anyone knows of any I wouldn't mind giving them a try, but I've always thought they were more of a gimmick than anything else.
3D-glasses are not a gimmick.
They have been used in mechanical/architectural/molecular CAD for well over a decade, and believe me, when looking at an active site within a proteinstructure, 3D-glasses help. Immensely.
3D-perception was important enough that before ready availability of LCD-shuttered glasses, we used dual mirror "binoculars" and drew double images on the screen which were then superimposed using the mirror "binoculars". I wrote such code myself, it was essential.
A lot (most, I'd say) of the bad reputation 3D-glasses have is due to people trying them being ignorant of the consequences of their operation, the most significant being that you need roughly twice the frame-rate, and twice the screen refresh-rate in order to maintain subjective image stability. If you try to use 3D-glasses with a 75Hz or so CRT, running a game at 30ish frames per second, the results will be pretty grim when split in half. But then, you asked for it. Headaches aren't surprising....
Furthermore, most games use 2D-interface elements which then doesn't behave well within a stereoscopic world. Trying to aim with a 2D-crosshair in a stereoscopic world is quite suboptimal. Fixable, if programmers bothered.
In a gaming context, 3D-glasses make sense for adventure games or RPGs. But they could be great for immersiveness in FPSs as well though, a game like Splinter Cell for instance (if not for the problems the frame-rates would bring).
When set up properly and operated under sympathetic conditions, 3D-glasses are great tools, and and for professional use, I'd say they are absolutely necessary accessories. Their use has some problems, but once you've experienced it working well, the current status quo of flat 2D-projections of internal 3D-models will never really satisfy you again. The picture of an apple can never approach the reality of it lying on the table in front of you. But I've several times unthinkingly reached out to touch stereoscopically projected objects. It quite literally adds another dimension to 3D-modelling.