Last week, Acer unveiled its first two consumer implementations of its SpatialLabs 3D displays and the company is demoing its SpatialLabs technology at Computex this week, which gave TPU a chance to get some hands, or rather eyes on time. At the time Acer released the press release, it wasn't really clear how these displays work and we can now provide a lot more details on what makes these displays so special. The displays rely on a special lenticular lens, a pair of eye-tracking cameras and some very clever software algorithms. When the 3D mode is disabled, it looks just as sharp as any other display and there weren't any visible distortions or other distractions on the panel. Acer had multiple demos at its booth, of which one was an interactive demo with hand tracking, where you could pick items out of a treasure chest. Another demo showed various 3D renders and in both cases, the objects were protruding out of the display, as well as extending inwards and it was very convincing 3D demos, especially considering no glasses were involved.

The demos that matter more to the TPU readership should be the game demos, of which the main one was God of War running on a desktop PC. Acer claims to support some 500 game titles today and although a custom launcher is required to get the 3D effect in games, Acer told us that games from Steam, Epic etc. should work just fine via its launcher. Here the 3D effect is more of a depth effect, since unless the game in question incorporates support for the display, there's no way to get objects in the game to protrude out of the display. The game did get that extra 3D dimension that older solutions that rely on glasses had, but the overall feeling was very different. Sadly there's no way of presenting what it was like using the display, but it was very much an impressive experience.The second game demo was of a racing game, running on the new Acer Predator Helios 300 laptop and an Xbox controller could be used to drive the vehicles in the game. As impressive as this technology is, it's not without its faults. First of all, if the cameras lose the eye-tracking for some reason, the display goes all crazy and people that suffer from motion sickness might want to wait a bit longer before investing in something like this. The cameras have a sweet spot for detection and once you go outside of that area, the 3D effect is no longer there.

This is why Acer went with a 15.6-inch panel, although it's a 4K panel, which was very crisp and sharp. However, it's also a 60 Hz panel and the brightness is only 400 nits, which puts it in a category most gamers wouldn't consider. Acer is working on improving the technology so they can bring it to larger displays and hopefully the price will come down as well, as US$1,099 is a lot of money to spend on a display for most consumers, especially with such a niche market at the moment. The company is looking at some other vertical markets, so don't be surprised if you'll find a version of this as part of the in-flight entertainment system on air planes in the future.