Gadgets

A team from Wake Forest University's Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials has created a new thermoelectric fabric they call Power Felt. It's constructed of "tiny carbon nanotubes locked up in flexible plastic fibers," though the final product looks and feels like fabric, and creates and electrical charge from changes in temperature--like, say, touching it with your hot finger, or sitting on it with your hot butt (hot in this case referring to temperature and thus wholly inoffensive science).

Thermoelectrics isn't a new field, but it's mostly been hampered by expensive materials that can cost up to $1,000 per kilogram. But Corey Hewitt, a graduate student at Wake Forest and member of the Power Felt team, says the new design could drastically bring down the price. For something small, like a cellphone case, the addition of Power Felt could cost as little as a dollar extra. And there are all kinds of possible applications, from apparel to car seats.

Our friends at Popular Photography got themselves a brand-new Canon G1 X, a super high-performance compact camera that, according to their tough tests, can compete with compact interchangeable-lens cameras like the 2011 Camera of the Year winner, the Sony NEX-7. It scored an Extremely High rating in image quality at low ISO, and retained acceptable image quality all the way up to ISO 6400. Plus, it clocks in at only $800. Check out their full test results here.

Light 18-volt batteries have become the standard for cordless power tools, but they often underperform when faced with difficult tasks such as boring large holes into wood or metal. To produce more strength without resorting to a heavier, higher-voltage battery, engineers at Milwaukee redesigned the motor of the new M18 Fuel drill. The result is a tool that generates about 25 percent more torque than the average 18-volt drill and can create big holes faster than any of them.

Most power tools use motors that employ conductive brushes and pieces of copper to generate an alternating magnetic field that drives the rotor. To increase the M18’s torque, engineers replaced brushes with a small electronic circuit board, leaving more room in the motor for rotor-driving magnets. The 4.3-pound tool yields 725 inch-pounds of torque, 30 percent more than its predecessor. All that extra strength doesn’t kill the drill’s battery life, though. The new motor is also more efficient, allowing the drill to run at least 50 percent longer per charge compared with the previous model

Size: 10.5 x 2.63 x 7.9 inches
Weight: 4.3 pounds
Screws per charge: 506 three-inch deck screws into pine 4x4
Price: $230

Electronic gaming has come a long way

When Atari's Pong first came out, Popular Science had a succinct opinion: Playing a game on a video screen was "one of those novelties that everyone will shortly get tired of." We've never been so glad to be wrong.

See the gallery.

As videogame designers rush forward in their perpetual quest to revolutionize the gaming experience, perhaps the most astounding achievement is just how far we've come in one lifetime.

Modern videogames are nearly unrecognizable from their early days of simple flashing lights and monotonous beeping. Here are 10 electronic games from America's not-too-distant past, including Pong, Nintendo's short-lived Virtual Boy and the awkward beginnings of online multiplayer. Whether the goal is paddling a tiny ball across the screen or defending a fictional world from a dragon god, gamers throughout time have one thing in common: They can never get enough playtime.

It's the most powerful handheld console ever made. But is it enough to get you to put down your iPhone?

Okay, so: The obvious question here, in 2012, is "Is there any reason to buy a dedicated portable gaming system when I already have a smartphone?" And I will say yes. I'm not a hardcore gamer, and I found the Vita to be not just the most powerful handheld console ever made, but also an awful lot of fun.

WHAT'S NEW
The Vita, like the PlayStation Portable (PSP) it replaces, introduces a new type of physical media (a little memory card, in this case, in size somewhere between a microSD card and a regular-sized SD card). The system is ridiculously powerful, boasting a quad-core processor and a quad-core graphics processing unit (GPU), plus 512 MB of RAM. (That's significantly more powerful than a current-gen iPad or iPhone, let alone a comparatively underpowered Nintendo 3DS.) It has a giant 5-inch OLED touchscreen, and a curious touch-sensitive back panel. It has two analog joysticks to the PSP's one. It has motion sensing. It is available with 3G. And Sony finally, thankfully makes it easy to download games over the air in addition to purchasing the little physical cards (which are all too easy to lose).

WHAT'S GOOD
The hardware is mostly very, very good. It has that oval-shaped black-and-silver Sony aesthetic, which is sort of shruggingly classy (though the front panel is very glossy and will quickly become very full of fingerprints). The screen is ridiculous. It's hard to tell until you pick a Vita up how much of a difference that extra screen space makes, compared to, especially, smartphones. It's a bigger screen than any smartphone (even the very large Samsung Galaxy Nexus), and, of course, your fingers aren't blocking it because it has actual buttons to use rather than just a touchscreen. It's super bright, painfully clear, delightfully colorful. Perky, pastel games like Touch My Katamari and Rayman Origins look absurdly cheerful.

The buttons, too, are perfect. Just the right amount of clickiness in the controls, the right amount of movement in the analog joysticks, everything as responsive as can be. Never once did I think to blame my frequent deaths in games on the controls. The touchscreen is also intuitive and responsive, years ahead of the resistive touchscreen of the Nintendo DS models. That's all helped along by the copious processing power, so games run perfectly smoothly.

The buttons, screen size, and gaming-focused hardware make it, flat out, a better "serious" gaming device than I think it's possible for a smartphone to be right now. Smartphone games are super impressive, but the best smartphone games are slight in stature, little timewasters like Angry Birds, Tiny Wings, and Words With Friends. The best games on the Vita are full-featured, absorbing titles. I've played FIFA on both iOS and on the Vita, and there's no comparison. On an iPhone, you're struggling with virtual joysticks (never a good option) on a 3.5-inch screen, made smaller by the fact that your thumbs are blocking a quarter of it. The graphics aren't as good. The options aren't as deep. You realize after playing with the Vita that smartphone games are snacks.

The Vita has a very robust OS behind its games. There has to be a way to open and close apps, adjust settings, work with maps and browsers and communication tools and cameras and all sorts of other things. Basically, there's also a smartphone in there, and I was surprised to find that it's all very thoughtfully and intuitively laid-out. Swipe up and down between your app/game shortcuts (basically, your home page). Swipe horizontally to switch between open apps/games. Close open apps/games with a little "swipe down from the corner to close" mechanism, like turning a page to be done with whatever you were doing. It's all very nice. Other reviewers have found this OS confusing. I find them confusing.

The games are crazy. Considering this is a brand-new system, which needs completely new, exclusive games (though you can download older PSP titles), I'm totally impressed with what Sony put together. The highest-profile games include FIFA, Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Wipeout 2048, and Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Mostly, they look amazing--at first glance, almost as good as an Xbox 360 or PS3 title. After you use the system for awhile, you realize it's not quite at that level, but still, a lot of these games are seriously "wow" powerful. They're not dumbed-down for mobile play at all, which feels almost surprising at first, if you're used to the smartphone versions of games.

WHAT'S BAD
Pretty much everything that's not literally playing games is disappointing. Yeah, it has a browser and Google Maps, but guaranteed, if you have a smartphone made in the last three years, your phone is better at both those tasks. (There's no email app, either, and the browser doesn't support any kind of video, not even YouTube.) The on-screen touch keyboard is especially annoying to use, since you have to reach your thumbs over the PlayStation buttons to hit the screen. The back touch panel is gimmicky; only a few games support it, and I found it very uncomfortable to use without accidentally hitting it, and not especially fun besides. (The exception is in FIFA, where the location you tap on the back panel corresponds to which part of the goal you're aiming at. Still uncomfortable to hold, but very effective.) There are some oddities in the OS, like the weirdness of having to tap twice to go into any game or app (once to open the thumbnail, another to actually launch it. Why? No idea.) And the speakers are surprisingly timid, volume-wise.

Sony's taste for proprietary media is a long-standing irritant; the Vita, for example, only supports PS Vita memory cards for things like music and movies, and they are absurdly expensive ($100 for 32GB. SD cards at that capacity cost about thirty bucks). It also is not a particularly open-minded media player, only playing a few types of video and audio files, and the media management software for your computer is very barebones.

The Vita won't fit in your pocket. Not my pocket, not your pocket, not anyone's pocket. I don't mind that, really, because the size is warranted by the screen and the buttons, and I always carry a messenger bag with me anyway. But it's something to note, because while it is fairly light and well-balanced, it is not particularly small. Battery life is rated at around four or five hours; not great, since my general rule is that a gadget should get me through a flight from New York to San Francisco. The Vita won't, though it's not incredibly far off.

THE PRICE
The 3G/Wi-Fi version costs $300, while the Wi-Fi-only version is $250. I'd recommend the Wi-Fi-only version. $300 is a lot for a games system, and if you want to do real multiplayer, it'd be better to have the speed of Wi-Fi anyway.

THE VERDICT
I really like the Vita. The games are great fun, it is astoundingly impressive in a technical sense, it looks excellent, and Rayman Origins is so, so good. Whether it's worth a buy depends on you: do you often find yourself wishing you had better gaming hardware on the go? Are smartphone games feeling too light, too insubstantial? Then yes, get the Vita. I don't really mind that the browser and non-gaming apps sort of suck. They're a bonus, and if your smartphone battery dies or something they might come in handy. The only real drawbacks are the price and the battery life, but I think neither should be a dealbreaker if you're hungering for some real mobile gaming. The Vita is a games system, and it's awesome at playing games.

Apple just announced the next version of Mac OS X, the operating system that runs on all Mac computers. It'll be called Mountain Lion, it'll come out this summer for an unspecified price, and it'll be chock full of the same apps you use on your iPhone and iPad. It's one more stop on the way to Apple's Ultimate Plan for Gadget Dominance (not an official title.): the convergence of Mac OS and iOS, which began in earnest with the current version, Lion.

We're not going to go into a big long discussion of the new features; we haven't played with the beta, like MacWorld has, after all. But some highlights include the migration of certain iOS apps, like iMessage (the free SMS-like messaging service; iChat will be renamed Messages and support the iMessage protocol), Notes, Reminders, and Game Center. There'll be a new notifications drop-down box in the upper-right corner, sort of like the notifications that fold down from the top of the screen in iOS. (It's also sort of exactly like Growl, the notifications app that's been essential software for Mac users for many years.)

You'll be able to share items directly to email or Twitter from certain apps like Safari, Preview, and Notes, the same way you can update Twitter directly from the Photos app in iOS. AirPlay will also come to the Mac, which, finally. AirPlay is the function in iPhones and iPads that lets you beam a song or video or photo right from your mobile device to an AirPlay-capable set-top box hooked up to your TV, like an Apple TV or Boxee Box. It's awesomely futuristic, and it's very welcome on the Mac.

Anyway, those are the highlights. Check out MacWorld for a more in-depth look. Mountain Lion is coming this summer sometime, in the Mac App store, just like Lion did. Judging by the past, we'd guess it'll cost around $30, but that's just a guess.

So they think they can dance? Three robots bust a move to try to win your vote, and be crowned Best Robotic Dancer We may still be a long way from fully-functioning robot maids or dog-walkers, but there's one thing consumer robot-makers have figured out: how to make 'em dance. This year, three music-responsive 'bots will be on sale, leaving us to wonder: who's got the best moves? So we gathered up the three contestants and blasted some "Robot Rock." We'll leave it to you to decide who rocks out the best. The Contestants: BeatBots MyKeepon (yellow corner) He trained to dance at Carnegie Mellon University, and is most famed for his rendition of Spoon's "I Turn My Camera On." MyKeepon prefers to dance perched atop his own black podium as he bops. In his free time, he works as a therapeutic tool for children with autism. Mattel Fijit Friend Willa (purple corner) Representing her entire Fijit Friend team, of which there are four, Willa moves, twirls and headbangs to any music you like -- all without the benefit of arms or legs. If you can't pick a song, she offers to sing her own, though we wouldn't recommend it. Tosy DiscoRobo (blue corner) DiscoRobo traveled from Vietnam to compete in the dance-off, confident he could best his competitors with his own brand of pop-and-lock moves -- not to mention articulating arms, moving legs, and wheels. We'll just have to see... Cast your vote before midnight on February 22: Online Surveys - Zoomerang.com Video by Dan Bracaglia

PopSci's top picks of Toy Fair 2012 (or why you need an iPhone to have any fun anymore)

As one commenter for last year's annual Toy Fair wrap-up pointed out, there was once a time when Lincoln Logs were considered a cutting-edge toy. It was never so clear as it is now, though, that the heyday of the analog toy has long-since passed. 2012 shall be the year of the app-enabled toy.

Half of the playthings that caught our attention require an iOS or Android device to do, well, anything. But, in adapting an already-powerful handset as the brains behind anything from a toy gun to a board game, today's crop of high-tech toys are able to become more capable and more immersive than anything that's come before.

That said, special props go to the three toys in our list that require no batteries at all.

According to a press release, Sony is fielding proposals for a way to charge users to, well, charge. The technology would allow building owners to require authentication for power outlets, which could be used to reduce unwanted energy usage, but could also be used to demand money from, say, coffeeshop squatters who want to charge their laptops.

Apparently Sony wants to use their FeliCa system, an RFID smart card protocol used pretty widely in Japan, for these new outlets. (It's not dissimilar from near-field communication.) Sounds like there would be a contactless chip in the outlet itself, able to authenticate as well as send power usage information to an interested party (like, whoever's paying the power bills). It's early in the development stages, but there's a sinister sense to it.

How much would you all pay for the ability to charge your laptop, phone, or tablet in a coffeeshop or airport?

[via The Verge]

Create robots from square puzzle pieces

Building and programming robots is no small feat. Just to get a robot to perform a simple action—say, turning when someone claps—can require hours of coding. Cubelets make robot creation as simple as stacking blocks.

Each 1.6-inch cube contains an eight-megahertz processor preprogrammed to execute one function. The six-block starter kit includes a rechargeable battery brick, as well as cubes that roll on rubber wheels, display an LED at varying intensities, and detect changes in lighting. Users configure the blocks however they choose, and the arrangement determines how the finished robot acts. (Magnets hold the blocks together, allowing copper connectors to transmit data between cubes.) The kit can make about 30 different robots; attaching the battery block to wheeled and light-sensitive blocks, for example, produces a robot that walks when the lights turn on.

Users can also buy individual Cubelets that react to changes in temperature, chirp, spin, and more. Later this year, the manufacturer plans to release a Cubelet containing a Bluetooth chip. Through a computer or smartphone browser, tinkerers will be able to reprogram the blocks by accessing their code and replacing commands, such as cues to “go” or “beep,” for an instant behavioral adjustment.

Voltage: 3.5 volts
Processor Speed: 8 megahertz per block
Battery Life: 2-6 hours
Price: $150 per set of 6, plus $25 (est.) for each additional cube

An Android speaker dock, a radiator booster, an RC spy-copter, and much more

Every month we search far and wide to bring you a dozen of the best new ideas in gear. These gadgets are the first, the best and the latest. Check out the gallery below to get the first look at what consumer technology has brought us this month.

Click to launch our guide to this February's best gadgets.

These are the anti-Monopolys

German- or Euro-style board games--the best-known of which is probably Settlers of Catan, at least here in the States--are a revolution in analog gaming. They're everything Monopoly is not: often simple but fiendishly clever, designed with a minimum of boring down-time and a maximum of player interaction, without the indignity of getting eliminated or the any semblance of luck. (Dice are pretty much verboten in these games.)

A Euro-style game fan I spoke to referred to Monopoly, Life, and the like as "Amero-trash games." Settlers of Catan originated in Germany, as did most of the rest of its ilk; Germans are famously crazy about board games, and mainstream German magazines often review games along with new movies and music releases. It's rare for Americans to seek out new games; we tend to have our mainstays, our Trivial Pursuit and our Scrabble and our Risk, but Germans are always experimenting, creating, and trying new games. There's even an award for games, the much-coveted annual Spiel des Jahres.

The games themselves are totally different, too: they're tightly designed (these games are also sometimes called "designer games"), and the designers become minor celebrities. Game creators like Reiner Knizia, Klaus Teuber, and Wolfgang Kramer create dozens or even hundreds of games, and their names are stamped on the box in the same way a movie might have the director's name in large type. In the past five or ten years, these games have started to take hold in the States, and they're causing Americans to see board games in a totally new light. They're not just for family game night anymore; these are difficult, interactive, strategic, and super fun games, and there are always more to discover.

I spoke to Daniel R. Nelon, from Seattle's famed Card Kingdom--it's housed in a former BMW showroom, hosts tournaments, has a cafe and bar attached, and is stubbornly located on the opposite coast from us at PopSci headquarters in New York City--to get an expert's point of view on the history of the games. He was also nice enough to provide a primer for beginning, intermediate, and expert players.

PopSci: So what makes a German-style board game?

Daniel R. Nelon: A Euro-game has little to nothing in the way of chance mechanisms, so there's very little luck involved. They tend to stick to wooden pieces over plastic, it's their preference. There's very little text on the board; only the rules have text on them, so you can actually play with people who speak other languages as long as you both already know how to play. They tend to value economics [themes] over military, and one of the most interesting things about [this style] is that there's no player elimination, so when people are playing the game, everyone is in it until the game is finally over. So nobody's sitting around waiting for the game to end.

Another really nice thing about Euro-style games is there's usually a nice catch-up mechanic, where if you are falling behind, there are other ways to catch up. So there's not necessarily always a runaway player.

PS: A friend of mine told me about playing in a Settlers of Catan tournament in which he pulled way ahead and got embargoed by the other players--they all stopped trading with him.

DRN: Yeah, that's what's interesting about Settlers of Catan, there's that trading aspect which allows everyone to be interactive during everyone else's turn, which a lot of Euro-style games focus on. So there's not a lot of down-time waiting for your turn.

Also in games like Catan, a lot of the more popular Euro games, they tend to be historical and based around worker placements, politics, and/or worker placements, and resource management.

It's interesting that those subjects are not inherently appealing to too many people, but these games are so popular.

DRN: Oh, definitely. I get that a lot from customers who come in and aren't traditionally gamers. There are games that we at the store consider "gateway games," and Settlers of Catan is definitely one of them. [Catan] was published in 1995, and it spread like wildfire, and now we're starting to get to the point where Settlers is replacing the normal household games, replacing Monopoly of Life. You can find it on peoples' shelves who aren't really gamers.

PS: When did you first start to see German- or Euro-style games pop up?

DRN: Euro games started getting popular around the '80s, that was when the rest of the world started to take notice of them. But one of the things that really helped open the world up to German- and Euro-style gaming was the internet. Before the internet, people didn't really know what other countries were playing or what kinds of games there were. One of the things people were really trying to do in the '80s was import games over here.

Then there were publications like Mike Siggins' SUMO, a quarterly publication focused on reviews and English translations of German games. Games at the time were mostly appealing to war-gamers and strategy gamers, things like Advanced Squad Leader.

At that time, a lot of the American games were kind of falling short--they were too light for war and RPG fans, and a little too dense to be family games. So when people started learning about other games [thanks to the internet], certain games started coming to light, like Scotland Yard, Metropolis, and Die Macher.

PS: Are those games still around?

DRN: Yes, those are still in print, which is surprising because in the board game world, most games don't actually stay in print all that long.

DANIEL'S MOST UNDERRATED GAMES

Ra: "It's a Reiner Knizia game," says Daniel. "Reiner Knizia is probably the most famous board game designer from Germany, he's published over 300 games. It's a really cool, interesting bidding game. It's a pretty tough game, because you have to guess what your opponents are going to bid on.
Hansa Teutonica: "It's a store favorite here, but overlooked in the States a lot," says Daniel.
Dungeon Lords: "Not a lot of people know about this game. It's definitely a 'Euro-game,' in the way it plays mechanically, but the theme is something that not a lot of Euro-gamers are used to--it's not the typical medieval, agriculture theme."

DANIEL'S PRIMER TO EURO-STYLE GAMES
For the beginner: "I usually send them to the more popular games, not because it's popular, but because they're easy to learn and they get non-gamers into gaming, basically. The three I usually rely on are Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan, and Dominion. Those are the three best-selling games in the store. Most of the time when I suggest those games, they come back for expansions or they want something similar to those games."

Something "similar, but a little overlooked," says Daniel, "is a game called Cartagena. It's based a famous escape from an impenetrable prison in I think the 1600s [ed. note: it was the 1672 pirate-led prison break]."

Daniel also mentioned Ticket to Ride more than once--it's a game in which you try to navigate a complicated train system. Like almost all of this style of game, Daniel promised that it's much more fun than it sounds.

For the intermediate: "I would usually go with a game like Blue Moon City, which is a beautiful game, component-wise--the artwork is really great--and it's actually a Reiner Knizia game too." It's kind of a post-apocalyptic game in which you try to rebuild a city according to the guidelines of the dragon overlords. "I haven't had anybody dislike that game," says Daniel.

Dungeon Petz is another one Daniel likes. "It's a worker placement game, it takes a little while to learn and about two, two-and-a-half hours to play, but it's very, very entertaining. But what's fun is that you're dealing with entities on the board that behave on their own." You have to raise the pets on the board, keeping them entertained and fed and contained (they can be destructive if allowed to break out of their cages).

Kingdom Builder, from the same designer as the wildly popular Dominion, is another good one. "The cool thing about it is that it's very easy to play. It is strategic, but it's not going to be too confusing for people. A family could play it, and a game lasts about 20 minutes, and it has very high replayability."

For the expert: "I'd recommend a game called Mage Knight: The Board Game. It's based on an old tabletop miniature game but it has really nothing to do with it aside from theme. This game is fantastic. I'm a little biased towards it because I think it's one of the best games to come out in the past five years. It's not very popular yet, and it's a little more difficult to find, but they're about to do a reprinting in the next few months."

"The board is modular; it has tiles you lay out as you explore. So the more you explore and wander, the bigger the board will get. It has a similar mechanic to Fable, so you basically get to decide if you want to be a bad-ass, really evil, or if you want to be good and noble. But you're not punished for being evil or rewarded for being good, necessarily." It's a deck-building game, in which your deck is determined by your behavior. It's also not for the faint of heart; Daniel describes the rulebook as "basically a short novel," but says it's also the game he currently plays the most.

More than 100 years of questionable games in the pages of PopSci

Popular Science's history isn't all flying cars and geodesic domes. Readers of the past liked to have fun, too! Unfortunately, their opportunities to do so, as far as we can tell, were somewhat limited.

See the gallery.

An 1892 issue of the magazine spells out the purpose of games, in case you didn't know: “They afford needful relaxation to the mind, pleasant diversions to the invalid and afflicted, promoting acquaintance and fellowship.”

Here are ten games that range from mildly exciting to about as fun as sorting laundry (literally--see "Wash Day" from 1931). Nearly all of these articles came with DIY instructions. Would you still play Scrabble if you had to carve each piece yourself?

Nearly 100 years of questionable games in the pages of PopSci

What do you smartphone apps say about you? Not in the “who am I and what is my place in the world?” sense, but literally--what are your apps telling other people about you? Your location? Your identity? Your username and password? The Wall Street Journal has put online a pretty amazing, sometimes outraging, definitely interesting interactive graphic analyzing 101 popular iPhone and Android apps, telling you exactly what your apps are telling other people.

Those other people can be the application owners themselves, or they can be third parties like marketers or ad providers like Google AdSense. Different apps share different info with different entities. Some, like Tweetdeck, make sense--it shares information with Tweetdeck itself as well as things that interface with Tweetdeck, like Facebook, Imageshack, bit.ly, and--of course--Twitter.

Others are a bit more questionable. For instance, did you know that Pandora--according to WSJ--is sharing various information from your phone with eight different third parties? We didn’t either, but we hope it’s sharing our listening preferences as well so all that incoming marketing will at least be sonically pleasing. Take a spin through the interactive graphic at WSJ to see exactly what your apps are saying about you.

[WSJ]

The Sony PlayStation TV beams a different image to each player's eyes, so no more splitscreen--which means no more "screen-cheating," and no more half-size screens

Gamers who prefer their multiplayer limited and local, as opposed to massive and online, will be familiar with the practice of screen cheating. The technique involves sneaking glances at your opponent’s section of the bi- or quadrisected television screen to determine his or her location to gain an advantage. If you were good at the seminal split screen multiplayer games--GoldenEye, Mario Kart, the first Halo--you screen cheated. If you were bad, you screen cheated. Whining about screen cheating was always sort of equivalent to a nuclear power whining that another country was building the bomb. Screen cheating was mutually assured destruction. And soon, it could be a thing of the past.

The popularization of networked consoles brought disarmament. The art of screen cheating became less essential. And now, 10 years after the internet solved the problem for most of us, Sony has made sure that gamers who still compete on the same TV can enjoy the same benefit--a whole screen for both players. This feature, what Sony calls SimulView, is the highlight of their new Playstation 3D Display, a 24-inch screen that projects two separate, fullscreen, HD feeds to two different people playing the same game.

This technology is really the reason we're excited about a 24-inch TV, so it’s good that SimulView works perfectly. I played the bundled-in racing game Motorstorm: Apocalypse with a coworker, and decades of screen cheating proved so ingrained that several times I instinctively looked at the bottom of the screen to try to see his position on the course. Throughout the races, I only saw the dirtbike of my co-racer a handful of times, when he was just ahead of or just to the side of me. It is an indisputably cool piece of tech: during our first race, my coworker and I kept saying “wow”, two children of the 1980s accustomed to squinting at a fraction of the screen realizing we'd no longer have to.

If you watch a race without glasses on, you see the perspectives laid on top of each other, producing a ghostly effect that gives you a real appreciation for the double duty that the set is pulling. My only reservation after a few sessions with Motorstorm is that the bright colors of the game, in SimulView, take on a light grey varnish. To me, though, faded colors seem a fair tradeoff for full-screen two-player multiplayer. Five games currently support the technology, and if you have any desire to play these games competitively against “IRL” friends, this set will be very tempting.

The technology here is great, but this particular TV has some issues. The bundle comes with only one pair of 3-D glasses, so you can’t use SimulView out of the box--you need to buy another pair, at a steep $70. Since the display does not come with a remote, I immediately noticed that the set-top buttons are tiny and hard to find. The display itself is too small to work as the main television anywhere except in the smallest rooms; you wouldn’t want to sit further than five or six feet away from it. The only logical use that comes to mind for a set this small is a dorm room--and would dorm-dwellers be looking to spend $400 on a TV that'll be discarded as soon as they move out?

The set doesn't look like Sony's other HDTVs; instead, it keeps with the aesthetic Sony has developed for the PlayStation brand since the launch of the Playstation 2 twelve years ago. It is sleek and black, with rounded sides that call to mind an oversized PSP. Fans of the brand will like the look but it does nothing to dispel the idea that the display is a novelty device rather than a versatile media machine or, you know, a real TV. Oh, and 3-D is not compatible with SimulView, so we were unable to play multiplayer Motorstorm in its very impressive 3-D mode. (3-D does work very well without SimulView, in a single-player mode.)
 
So the machine has a lot of faults, but I didn’t find them sufficient to diminish the initial “whoah” factor of SimulView. As a demonstration of a genuinely impressive piece of gaming technology, the display serves its purpose. As an actual consumer device people would want to put in their homes, it leaves a lot to be desired. Still, I can easily imagine SimulView in a larger televisions, branded less aggressively to a hardcore gaming audience, setting the future standard for a retro form of gaming--local multiplayer.

The Sony PlayStation 3-D Display is available now for $400.