I got my new graphics card into my machine at home. (For those that care, it's an Asus 7700 GeForce2 with 64Mb.) This graphics card supports shutter glasses, and one pair of them comes with the board.
Shutter glasses are synchronized to the screen, and the left and right eyes alternately become opaque each time the screen refreshes. The net effect is that when the image intended for your left eye is on the screen, the lens of the right eye becomes opaque, and vice versa. This happens very quickly (120 times or more a second), so you don't notice much flickering.
Unfortunately, the lens doesn't get totally opaque, so there is some minor ghosting as each eye sees a little bit of the other eye's image. On some applications, this is hardly noticeable, but if there are bright foreground objects, it can be very distracting.
Anyway, this graphics card can make any game or application that uses Direct3D or OpenGL work with the shutter glasses to form 3D images. It is very cool. Lasers recede into the distance in Quake II, and body parts fly up and around you in Carmegeddon 2. I actually ducked a little when a car exploded in front of my mighty bulldozer.
I'm going to play with my camera a little to see if I can produce 3D photos that use the shutter glasses. The documentation is pretty sparse, but I will beat it into submission. I don't want to - I have to. I've had some luck making red/blue 3D stereo pairs in the past, but this will give me full color images
On a related note, I found a neat web site the other day that shows how to make holograms with a piece of plastic and a sharp compass (the drawing type, not the directional type). Fascinating!
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Two rants don't make a right.