Two Gamers, Two Headsets, One Screen

Playing a racing game with a buddy on the same screen? With Texas Instruments' hybrid of 3D DLP technology, you'd only see your car, and he'd only see his car. Playing Halo 3? You'll won't know she's sneaking up on you with the rocket launcher until you're a crater in the ground.

That's the idea behind DualView, a prototype that TI's been showing off here at CES. Here's how it works: Two players competing against each other in a console game each get headsets. Both are looking at the same screen, but the gamer on the left sees his car (or Master Chief or Mario), and the other gamer sees her own, private view of the game. I tried it myself, and the illusion works perfectly. I saw my view of Project Gotham Racing 4 filling the DLP screen, in full resolution, while my opposite number only saw his own car.

My TI rep said the DualView idea began percolating about a year ago, and it simply takes the principle of stereoscopic 3D video and applies it to multiplayer gaming; that is, instead of two slightly different images appear on the same screen—one for your left eye, and one for your right (creating the illusion of 3D), DualView puts two completely different images on the screen at once, and the image you see depends on the headset you're wearing.

It's a cool idea on paper, but it's cumbersome in practice (for now, at least). For the demo at CES, TI had two Xbox 360s networked together and used an adapter to weave the video from both consoles onto a single screen—a single console isn't going to deliver two full-resolution images for a local battle. Throw in about $200 for each headset and, say, $200 for a DualView adapter (which is still in development, of course; these prices are just estimates from TI), and the whole DualView experience could end up being a pretty pricey proposition. Still, it's an interesting concept—something for the PS5 or the Xbox 720, perhaps?