Cost: $99

Web Site: www.3drevelator.com

The gunman aims his chain gun at you, a foot from your face. You stare at the long, long barrel, if you could just be quick enough to get out of the way... The world explodes as he pulls the trigger. Your body flops onto the ground in a gory writhing mess.

You jump right out of your seat, take off the 3D glasses and look around to make sure nobody saw your reaction. Your brow and hands are damp with nervous sweat. The gun was pointing out of the monitor!

The Elsa 3D Revelator has arrived.

The Revelator package consists of a driver that interfaces with Microsoft's DirectX, a pair of polarizing glasses with an IR receiver built-in, and an IR emitter that hooks in-line with your VGA cable. The Revelator takes the 3D of your normal D3D games and makes them look truly 3D. Through the use of special drivers and 3D techniques, games will pop out of the monitor and fall back inside it with a level of depth you've probably never seen in a computer and certainly have never seen in a system that works this well for less than $100. And to top it all off, unlike the competition, they use an infrared (IR) wireless synching system that allows you complete freedom of movement while playing your favorite D3D games.

The software driver aspect of the Revelator consists of a driver that calculates separate on-screen 3D images for the left eye and the right eye. It does this by looking at a game's Z-buffer usage in D3D. If a game doesn't use the Z-buffer of D3D then the 3D Revelator software has nothing to work with and there is no enhanced 3D effect. The images calculated by the Z-buffer are then rendered and displayed on screen on alternating screen refreshes. Frame 1 is for the left eye, frame 2 is for the right, frame 3 left, frame 4 right, and so on. Without the glasses, it looks as if there are two images overlaid upon each other, side by side and slightly offset, which is exactly what is going on.