Sony has announced a new Sony PlayStation 3D 24-inch monitor at its E3 press conference in LA and Pocket-lint was on hand to try out the new screen with its new dedicated features.

Clearly aimed at the college students hoping to enjoy the 3D their PS3 gives them  - even the demo area was a college dorm - Sony is hoping that by reducing the price and therefore the barrier to entry for 3D, more of us will want to embrace the third-dimension.

Currently priced in the USA at $499 you’ll get that monitor, a 6ft HDMI cable, one pair of active 3D glasses and a copy of Resistance 3 for the PS3 (yep that’s one of the company’s new 3D games due out later this year).

Tech specs of the new display include a 5000:1 contrast, a 176-degree viewing angle and 4ms response time.

However, where the Sony 3D monitor is hoping to stand out from its more expensive Bravia cousins is the ability to let you play spilt screen on the same screen.

e32011

The idea behind the concept, which is now a reality, is that one pair of glasses will let you see one image, while a second pair of glasses a second image on the same screen.

The technology works by splitting the 3D signal (which is two images anyway) and only showing what the left eye would normally see to one set of glasses and the other to the right set.

While that means that you’ll only get a 2D image in that mode, it will be Full HD thanks to the active shutter technology.

If all that sounds complicated, in practice it isn’t, and by simply physically switching glasses you can see what your fellow gamer can see and vice versa.

But if you think that’s coming to your big state-of-the-art 3D TV in your living room, think again.

Sony tells us that even though we’ve personally seen it working on a standard 3D TV with a PS3 in the UK in a demo, the technology in this case has been specifically baked into this set up, and more specifically with the new glasses.

It also means that the game you want to play will need to support the new spilt screen mode. It’s not going to work on any standard 2D game for example.

We were demoed the technology with a rolling 3D demo that showed a number of titles including Wipeout.

We can happily report back that the technology works. Because it’s based on the glasses, not actually where you sit, you can move around without seeing both images overlaid on them (a problem we had with our first demo).

The lack of 3D when you wear the 3D glasses is slightly off putting, especially as you will probably be expecting 3D, but that’s unlikely to bother - it means you can play multiplayer longer as your eyes won’t hurt as much.

So will this work? It certainly reduces the cost of getting into 3D, something that Sony is clearly trying to achieve here.

Does that mean 3D isn’t taking off as well as it had hoped? Maybe, but it’s probably more the case that only people upgrading or renewing their TV are thinking about 3D at the moment, and at that level TV sets are still very expensive.

This is likely to change that, suggesting that next time you find yourself in a university or college bedroom playing games you’ll probably going to be doing it in 3D.

- Check out our E3 2011 homepage for more E3 coverage.