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Originally, this was supposed to be a straight review of Sony Corp.’s updated Personal 3D Viewer. Then things changed.

I went hands-on with the orignal model for the National Post last year, describing it as “a head-mounted visor that makes the user look like the futuristic lovechild of a Battelstar Galactica Centurion and Geordie LaForge.”

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You can connect it to your PC or PlayStation 3, and use it to play games and watch movies in 3D.

The new model HMZ-T2 is lighter, and you can now use your own pair of headphones too (before you were stuck with the ones Sony built in). But the general head-mounted visor idea remains the same.

What differs is the competition. And its name is Oculus Rift.

Oculus Riftis another 3D visor, demoed to press over the past few months, and in pre-arranged meetings offsite during the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week.

But unlike Sony’s visor, which is sometimes billed as a wearable HDTV, the Oculus Rift is built with immersive, virtual reality gaming alone in mind. It uses gyroscopes and accelerometers to track the motion and movement of your head, and mirrors those movements in-game. It’s an active experience, whereas Sony’s viewer, as the name implies, is purely passive.