If the world of 21st century technology was a field of powerful horses and delicious cows, 3D stuff would be the waste that comes out the back of them. No matter how much we say, "We don't want 3D TV," the more manufacturers interpret that as, "Ah, so you want more 3D TV?"
The gaming world is a moderately more tolerable adopter of this entirely unimpressive technological venture, however, so 3D laptops earn our mild interest. Acer showed one off in October, and now Asus has announced its first 3D gaming laptop: the G51J 3D.
Essentially it's a reasonably high-end portable gaming rig, but with a 120Hz LCD display capable of working with Nvidia's 3D Vision system to make standard PC games 3D. You need to wear some crap, annoying glasses, plug in a crap, annoying USB transmitter to sync the screen with them, and as a bonus you'll probably get a crap, annoying ache in the balls as a result. Eyeballs, obviously.
The 15-inch machine itself is -- wait for it -- well-specced, as it's essentially the same as the existing G51J laptop. It has a 1.6GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 260M GPU, and, providing the final spec mirrors those on the original model, 4GB of RAM and two 320GB hard drives. Obviously you get a pair of the Nvidia glasses in the box.
We dropped a line to Asus's PR office this morning to find out when this 3D machine might invade the UK, but currently we have no answer. It will launch in the next few days in the US for $1,699 (£1,000), according to our US colleague Dan Ackerman.