The next really cool thing we saw was over at the eMagin, where Joseph Runde showed us his virtual reality headset. Now, virtual reality headsets are nothing new. I remember going to the mall back in the day and seeing kids wearing huge clunky head gear while surrounded by some kind of ring thing. With this eMagin headset, those days are long gone. The headset itself is a very lightweight device that fits surprisingly comfortably on your head. The display itself is generated from two OLED displays within the brains of the device. Also included in the device are three gyroscopes that allow motion to be picked up. Beyond the display part, the headset is also equipped with a built-in earphone feature. These earphones can be detached completely from the headset to allow for third party audio devices to be attached. The headset also comes with a built-in microphone. As hardware enthusiasts, and more importantly as gamers, we gave this product the full critique, but we could not think of one thing that they seem to have missed in the research and design.

In the same area as the eMagin booth was the Saitek booth, where they had some new mouses on display as well as a very interesting looking gamepad device. Although we weren’t able to get our hands on either to test on an actual game, they looked really cool and seem to have taken some of the design suggestions we made in our mouse review article into contention.

When we came across the Ideazon booth at E3 we were expecting the same old Merc/Zboard combination. Not only were we totally wrong, but they also had some very interesting news to share with us that we can’t reveal just yet. One thing they did have, however, was the Fang. The Fang is a brand new product from Ideazon that they actually developed for military use. After the military was done training with it, they did a very small redesign, renamed it, and marketed it as the “Fang” game pad. Using the Fang seemed to require a bit of a learning curve, but the buttons are definitely laid out quite well and playing on it was quite fun. And with our departure from Ideazon came the end of the day 1 E3 exhibition – on to the parties.

Turns out GGL had a party going on after day 1 of E3, where they hosted the Vsports Allstar game between Europe and the Americas. Being GotFrag, of course we were invited. We had settled in to a nice drink and dinner while watching the Allstar game when we noticed something interesting about the computers; turns out that all 10 tournament computers were running Intel Core 2 Duo processors. Upon closer inspection we also noticed that they utilized NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX video cards. After these discoveries, we were totally dying to get our grubby hands on one of these systems after the match – and that’s exactly what we ended up doing. We swooped on Michael “method” So’s computer after the match in exchange for letting him borrow our camera to take a picture of himself standing next to Leeroy Jenkins (yes, Leeroy himself was there), and started to have at it. A quick check of the system details revealed that each computer was sporting 3.25GB of RAM, a Core 2 Duo processor at 2.66GHz, and a GeForce 7800GTX. We ran some benchmarks on it to get an idea of the performance even though we weren’t really supposed to, and we got some amazing results. One of the benchmarks we ran was SuperPI 1M, and though we cant technically tell you what the processor actually scored, we can tell you it was below 20 seconds. The system also was able to crank out 999FPS in Counter-Strike 1.6 (not that that matters) under developer 1, and achieved well over 400FPS right in the thicket of 2 smoke grenades. The results we achieved on the rest of our benchmarks were nothing short of spectacular, and we will report those scores to you on Friday, when we get a real good chance to run our full benchmark suite (fun!). Our overall impression of Core 2 Duo so far is that it is the fastest thing we have ever used, and we cant wait to get our hands on one for a full-blown review.

Be sure to check out our E3 picture gallery!