I wish people who don't know anything about 3D would just not post their opinions about it. They saw a movie in 3D and they think they're experts on the technology.
To those who say it's a gimmick, I ask you to explain how it's a gimmick but color and surround sound are not. You don't need any of them to enjoy a game or movie, and they cost more. Does that mean they're artificial gimmicks? No. They try to more closely replicate real-life experiences. And in real life, for people with two properly functioning eyes, objects and scenes appear to have depth. Saying that 3D is a gimmick is as silly as saying that you'll stick with your color TV because color is a gimmick.
To those who say they don't want 3D until you can do it without glasses or you get 3D projections from all sides, have fun waiting. Can you do 3D without glasses? Sure, for one person per screen, if you sit in the right location and don't move. Let's see that take off for large displays. Can you get 3D projections/holograms/whatever? For things rendered in real-time, yes, with equipment more expensive than a decent car and as bulky as a small refrigerator. For movies? Not going to happen, unless you know some magical way of recording a scene from every angle a viewer might observe from. Even if you had tech that could create a Holodeck-grade 3D projection, you still need a way to capture the action from every angle, or you're no better off than standard stereo 3D.
Stereo 3D for games is the most natural and obvious thing ever, and it's pretty simple to add in (for PCs). Most games already support it. It halves your performance, but when has a better visual experience not done that? All you have to do to make a pre-stereoscopic 3D game work well is to minimize your reliance on hacks: don't use textures to represent 3D objects and effects (fire and smoke, iron sights for guns, chain link fences you can get close to, etc). Make sure your in-game models are scaled appropriately to the world and don't let someone holding a sniper rifle that sticks 3 feet in front of them put their nose up against a wall--make them hold the rifle to their chest, for example. Make sure your shadows and skies render properly--shadows are sometimes drawn onto the screen rather than the objects they're cast on, which is very obvious in 3D, and skies are sometimes on the surface of the screen rather than way far inside it. Try to make your menus and interfaces out of 3D objects if you want to wow people even more. If you keep those things in mind when making a game, it'll work in 3D just fine.
What you don't need to do, and shouldn't do, is design your game to intentionally have stuff pop out at people all the time. That's distracting and forced most of the time. Just let 3D happen.
But honestly, stereo 3D on the PS3 seems like trying to make a goose lay golden eggs after you've plucked and cooked it, or some other colorful metaphor. The PS3 lacks the performance to play most games at 1080p, and even 720p@60 fps for many. Stereo 3D, aside from its design implications which are tricky to patch after the fact, simply halves performance. If you're getting 40 fps in a PS3 game to start, getting 20 in stereo 3D mode will look pretty awful. What's supposed to enhance the sense of realism will just detract from it, trading lifelike fluidity for lifelike depth. If you care at all about stereo 3D, you should do the proper thing and get a 1080p 120 Hz display so you can enjoy 60 fps in 1080p, rather than 15-20 fps in sub-720p.
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