If you have a 3D TV and have been looking for more 3D content, it's time to check out YouTube's 3D channel. Although Google has been playing with 3D on YouTube for some time, yesterday the company officially activated the channel: It now supports multiple stereoscopic formats, including side-by-side (used by newer active and passive 3D TVs), checkerboard (the format used by some older rear-projection DLP TVs), and even anaglyph (like the old colored cardboard glasses).

But YouTube 3D isn't just for TVs—there's also now support for some 3D computers. Yesterday Nvidia, Mozilla, and Google announced that computers with Nvidia's 3D Vision hardware—which has been upgraded for HTML5 playback and WebM support—can now play stereoscopic 3D videos on YouTube when used with the Firefox 4 browser. (Note, however, that Nvidia's SLI graphics scaling feature must be turned off for it to work.) We expect that more 3D hardware/software systems will support this 3D initiative once they add the required elements of the HTML5 draft standard.

Like cable and satellite TV service providers, YouTube's side-by-side format squeezes two images into the space normally occupied by a single high-resolution picture, cutting the horizontal resolution in half (960x1080). Based on our limited initial viewing on an active 3D TV—which is capable of full 1080p images to each eye—the level of quality can vary greatly. But the availability of additional 3D content is certainly welcome.

And thanks to the arrival of 3D cameras an camcorders, we expect there to be a growing amount of user-generated 3D content to complement the commercial 3D content on the site.

If you have a 3D TV, let us know what you think about YouTube's 3D channel. It would also be great to let us know which clips you find the most compelling.

Nvidia: NVIDIA 3D Vision Video Now Available Worldwide on YouTube