I spent several hours yesterday researching what consumer stereo shutter glasses are still available—I even went down to Fry’s in a fruitless attempt to find them in a retail store. What amazed me was the number of different glasses that have been sold over the years, as well as the number of different methods used to connect the glasses to the computer.

From reading the Stereo3D charts—and just from common sense—it becomes clear that the only sensible interface standard is what this site calls “VESA-3″—the three-pin mini-DIN connector initiated by StereoGraphics and adopted as a standard by VESA.

After finishing that fishing expedition, I decided to visit StereoGraphics’ Web site, to see what they were up to, and discovered a pleasant surprise. The company announced at SolidWorks World that the next version of SolidWorks will be supporting its shutter glasses. This is great news, and tells me that that stereoscopic display is far from dead in the CAD industry.

So with this encouraging news, I’ll be adding stereoscopic support to my list of must-have features that I test with all CAD software.