Call of Duty: Black Ops – The 3D First Person Shooter Experience

Call of Duty: Black Ops is the new first person shooter from developer Treyarch and publisher Activision Blizzard, allowing the player to experience the covert ops conflicts between the United States and Russia during the era of the Cold War.

We've already played Mafia II in full three dimensions with the help of Nvidia but the open world nature of the game, with long driving sequences punctuated by furious fire fights, was a little too tame for 3D to really shine.

Call of Duty: Black Ops is a real treat with 3D glasses on and a carefully adjusted depth setting, especially when the game delivers the sort of carefully crafted complex vistas that can be seen in the level where a Soyuz capsule launch is happening or in the rooftop chase sequence.

The hardware we used is a Nvidia GeForce 460 card with 768 MB video memory paired with an Acer monitor.

Being a first person shooter Black Ops is much more kinetic when it comes to movement and shooting than Mafia II and the three dimensions make the experience much more engaging than in 2D.

Weapons in particular and characters moving quickly really seem to come at the player, sometimes almost eliciting a physical response, like dodging out of the path of RPG rounds while trying to snipe the enemy that shot them.

The three dimensions work best in small cramped space and the relentless “push forward” nature of Call of Duty suits the game very well.

One small problem I noticed is that some lengths are exaggerated when using 3D, which is especially annoying when using a long barreled sniper rifle or a rocket launcher.

3D is also a bit of a problem for those who, like me, wear pretty thick glasses and need to fit another pair on top of them to enjoy the new technology, so if 3D really becomes mainstream with glasses on I predict quite a surge in contact lenses sales among gamers.

The technology is not yet very cheap, with the 3D capable monitors currently more expensive than the Nvidia cards, but costs should come down pretty quickly in the coming months and years.