At CES 2023 this year, Asus announced a laptop with a 3D OLED display, the ProArt StudioBook 3D. But contrary to a lot of the stories to comeout of CES, the real story is the OLED, not just the 3D.

You see, we've had 3D before, and it's quite good. All you'd have to do is check out Acer's SpacialLabs stuff, which the company has been working on for a couple of years now. Indeed, I also met with Acer at the show, where it had several Predator Helios 300 SpatialLabs Edition laptops on display. That's right; Acer has expanded beyond the creative crowd and into 3D gaming, so I got to play Forza Horizon 5 in 3D for a while.

Asus took a similar technology and did it with an OLED display. That means that the colors are more vibrant, and the blacks are true blacks. It's not just 3D; it's beautiful 3D.

Asus ProArt Studiobook Pro 16 3D OLED 7-1

Asus had a lot of cool demos with its 3D laptop. Most of it was videos with 3D animations, but there was another example, a surgical demo, where you can see 3D organs that you can adjust with a pen. Indeed, there are a lot of possible use cases for a technology like this, and it's early days for Asus. Since the company is just getting started with 3D, it's looking at everything, from 3D models to animations to surgery.

The way it works is similar to what we've already seen from competitors. It tracks your eyes, which it will use to adjust the image, and it tracks your head. That allows for a dynamic perspective (throwback for anyone that remembers the Amazon Fire Phone) where you can move your head around and see different parts of the image.

The screen has an OLED layer, an optcal resin layer, a glass panel, a lenticular lens layer, and then a 3D liquid crystal switching layer. All of that adds up to the 3D experience you'll get if you see the prodct in person, and is frankly impossible to photograph.

Asus ProArt Studiobook Pro 16 3D OLED 3-1

Right now for Asus, it's basically a neat trick. This is something that we see with first-gen products. Asus will ship this, get feedback, and understand more of what people will actually use a display like this for. I'd expect more refined products to ship in 2024, and you'll see a more narrow scope in the defined use cases.

For now, the Asus ProArt Studiobook 3D is definitely a cool product. But like I said, the really cool part is that Asus did this with OLED. As we say, OLED all the things.