Eyes-on impression: Icuiti iWear

Roaming around the North hall expo floor, we stopped by Icuiti to check out their iWear 3D goggles. Although Marketing Rep Adam Travers explained that their primary audience was not necessarily gamers, for demonstration purposes they were running the headset with Unreal Tournament 2004. (For clarification purposes, Travers explained their audience would also be business people conducting and attending interviews in a virtual environment akin to Second Life.)

There were two models at the floor: the AV920 and the more premium VR920, which is being touted as the "first interactive Video Eyewear for gamers." The difference between the two models was $50 (as quoted by Travers, at least), a microphone and an accelerometer for motion tracking. The 3D portion when playing UT 2004 worked on multi-floored rooms where you could see all the floors, though the impact does not compensate for the price. Wearing the headset was surprisingly comfortable. When we added our glasses to the mix, the headset dropped a bit but still managed to work decently. At all times we could divert our eyes downward and clearly view the keyboard and mouse.

The accelerometer found in VR920 was ineffective in our trial and interfered with our mouse work, but we can't pinpoint if that's the fault of the headset or our intuition to look around the monitor without causing the screen to inadvertently move with it. Complaints aside, we just don't see an audience in game culture for eyewear right now. The iWear headsets cost $399 and $349, respectively.