This might sound like you’ve gone back in time ten years but Acer is bringing its take on a 3D experience to its laptop and monitor range. Acer isn’t behind the times. This is the SpatialLabs glasses-free stereoscopic 3D tech the Taiwanese tech company has been touting for a while.

Acer is bringing this new tech to its new Predator Helios 300 SpatialLabs Edition laptop and SpatialLabs View and SpatialLabs View Pro portable monitors.

For when two dimensions aren’t enough

Acer’s new 3D tech uses a special stereoscopic 2D UHD display with something called a lenticular lens that’s been optically bonded to it, that’ll allow it to display both 2D and 3D media. Eye-tracking keeps the image in focus without any glasses and real-time rendering work together to achieve the extra dimension.

The Predator Helios 300 SpatialLabs Edition will feature Intel’s newest 12th-gen CPUs, Nvidia’s RTX 3000 series GPUs, and 32GB of DRR5 RAM. You already know it isn’t going to be cheap but you also need to factor in the early adopter’s tax for all this new tech.

Across the oceans, it will start at $3,400 (~R54,000) but you can expect that to be more when it reaches our shores sometime in Q4 2022. When you consider the rather short list of supported titles at launch, it might be worth waiting to see if the tech takes off, like the Nintendo Switch, or if it won’t, like HD-DVD. We’ll have to wait until we have a sample to behold with our own eyes before we can pass any judgments but consider us cautiously optimistic.

We don’t know about the Acer SpatialLabs View and View Pro 15.6in portable monitors. We recently had Asus’ newest portable monitor in our offices and while that was a well-polished little unit, the price might be a little high for most. These 3D monitors make that price look reasonable. If you’re a designer for the metaverse then there might be a case for picking one up. But even that is probably a stretch, unless you’re the sort who has to be first on the block with absolutely everything.