3D Gaming is COMING BACK?? Acer SpatialLabs View Pro 27” 4K 160 Hz Gaming Monitor Review

3D IS BACK? Acer sure seems to think so! Acer’s “SpatialLabs” brand has found its way into a couple of different products of late – laptops, and this, the SpatialLabs View Pro 27. I should make it clear that  I am probably the wrong person to be reviewing this – I’m not the target audience so my view of it is clouded by headaches and eye strain – so take what I say here with a pinch, or an ocean, of salt. With that said, I can’t deny that this is a really cool bit of kit, so let me show you around it then talk you through actually using it. 

On the face of it, this is basically a 4K 160 Hz AHVA panel with decent but not word-beating specs. 400 nits of peak brightness, a 5 millisecond response time, a 1000:1 contrast ratio, and a DeltaE of under two for colour accuracy. That’s decent, but hardly game-changing. Then you look at the thing. It is a chonker. It’s a good inch thick, with equally thick bezels all the way around the front too, and yet there are a few key standout points. First, the dual front-facing speaker pods. These are angled upwards to aim squarely at your ears, and despite their meagre 2.5 watt per speaker rating they do sound pretty good. I’ll come back to those in a bit, especially because they tie quite neatly into the other oddity here, up at the top bar. This has an eye tracker built in, equally tilted down to aim at your eyes, which is kind of the centrepiece of how this whole thing works. Again, we’ll be talking about that in detail in a second, but let’s continue our tour. IO is HDMI, DisplayPort, and USB C for downlink along with the couple of USB 3 ports and DC in. The menu is controlled by a joystick style switch on the back along with a couple of individual buttons, and the menu is Acer’s usual style. Interestingly Freesync has to be disabled to change the overdrive mode from anything other than “Normal” (your other options are “off” and “extreme”). You’ve also got a backlight strobing mode which also has three settings including off. And of course you’ve got a decent amount of adjustment in the stand in the form of height, tilt and swivel, although no rotation to portrait mode because for this sort of display that just doesn’t make sense.

Right, that’s a brief look around, now to the interesting stuff. This is a full glasses-free 3D experience that, as far as I can tell, works by doing eye tracking and displaying two appropriately spaced frames at once. That eye tracker also works in tandem with the speakers, doing audio tracking too, along with the visuals. Unfortunately neither of these experiences translate well on camera so this is one where I have to tell, not show. What I can say is that the audio tracking is great. There’s a level of situational awareness especially in games that this gives you, possibly even better than headphones. It’s genuinely immersive, and makes for an excellent gaming experience. The speakers aren’t truly amazing quality, a good set of speakers or even headphones will give you a better listening experience, especially for movies and TV, but for gaming these are perfectly good enough. As for the 3D experience… Well that’s where it gets interesting. Let me talk through it while experiencing it then we’ll come back to the rather interesting discoveries I’ve made here.

This bit is available in the video above of me actually using it!

So how does it manage to achieve this madness? Well through a mixture of bugs and macro photography I think I have at least some of an idea. First, one time I opened the model viewer it accidentally rendered the two frames fully side-by-side, rather than interlaced, which gives you a look at how this thing is working. It’s drawing half a frame per eye and spreading them out so you get a stereoscopic view. Second, if I get real close up to the display, at first you can see that this is just a typical RGB subpixel layout. No problems here. Now let’s look at the same sub-pixels within the model viewer (with the 3D mode turned on) and… whoa! That’s not normal! There’s a second panel on top of the first, with much, much larger pixels! And, like, at an angle! If I had to guess this is a 1080p panel stacked diagonally on top of the 4K panel beneath, which explains why text looks dreadful – in fact kind of everything looks dreadful with 3D enabled – and why when I got my wife to try it her literal first words were, “what is this, from the 90’s?”. Anyway, how it uses the panel to give you a 3D effect I’m still a little unclear on. You can see the haze around edges in particular on camera where it is displaying the two frames with quite a hefty distance between – here’s a high speed clip trying to catch it do any sort of switching but as far as I can tell it it just perma-displays each eye’s frame at once, possibly at half opacity though. Anyway, you can see just how much of a gap there is between the two frames here. Interestingly, even just looking at the display side on (out of the eye tracking’s view) you get a bit of a ‘hologram’ effect like those shiny stickers do, where you see the two differently spaced frames as you move around. I think at least that shows just how different this panel is to a regular LCD!

Since we are talking about testing, I did test the response times and yep it’s right around the claimed 5 millisecond figure on “Normal” – the only mode you can use with Freesync enabled. Input lag is spot on at around 4 milliseconds, and I did also use the live view mode OSRTT offers to test the backlight strobing modes. With VBR set to “Normal” the backlight is on for half the frame time. On “Extreme” the backlight is only on for a little over one millisecond per frame. This cuts the brightness considerably – about one sixth – and of course the fact the display is literally flashing 160 times per second isn’t great for your eyes. If you want an open source response time tool to capture data like this yourself by the way, I make these right here at home and ship them worldwide. They are available at OSRTT.com, that’s linked in the description. Oh and the colour data was interesting, just 95% coverage of DCI P3 and 70% of Rec2020 when really good displays are 100% and closer to 80% respectively. This is still good for sure, just not amazing. Brightness is better than claimed at 484 nits and a little over 1000:1 on the contrast ratio, and the claimed sub 2 DeltaE is true at 1.26 by my testing. Not bad!

Obviously the key thing with this display is the glasses-free 3D experience. As I said this isn’t for me, I get headaches looking at it for too long and it feels like I’m cross eyed which isn’t comfortable. I did try and calibrate it but that didn’t help, and moreover I’d say that the eye tracking that this system is fully reliant on isn’t quite good enough to make it a seamless experience. Absolutely none of the times I tried this – in a variety of lighting conditions mind you – did I get a jitter-free experience. The model viewer jumps around a lot, and even in games there’s plenty of times when it’d freak out. On top of that, the relatively limited set of games that even support 3D is pretty limited, and I could not get the SpatialLabs Go program to enable in non-supported games. It just wouldn’t for me. That could be a me problem, but I suspect part of that is a blessing as a good 3D solution relies on the game being able to partially render objects at different depths at differing levels of offset to provide that depth effect – and that isn’t possible when taking a 2D frame on its own. 

The final nail in the proverbial coffin here is likely the price tag. Even on sale this thing is £1,800. MSRP is £2,200. I don’t think I need to explain just how much money that really is – although you could buy two of Sony’s frankly amazing M10S 480Hz 1440p OLEDs for the MSRP, so that should do it. Obviously this isn’t for me, but if you think you’d even be remotely interested in it I would absolutely love to hear why in the comments below! I’d love to hear your point of view so I can better understand this thing, because as I said from my own view I can’t understand the appeal – but I’m not everyone, so please do let me know in the comments!