Here's Comes 3-D TV
Open up some new landfills. All those mega-screen HD TVs will be toast, as far as the "must have it now!" visual addicts are concerned, when 3-D TVs start hitting the stores in five or so years :
I'm sitting in Paris and some butterflies are fluttering towards me. Loads of them, perfectly clearly. I could allow one to land on my hand or catch one of the rose petals being blown towards me - except I can't, because they're not real. They're images on a TV in high definition - and in perfect 3-D. They look life-sized and real, and I'm not wearing silly spectacles, other than the ones I wear all the time.
People have been working on convincing 3-D without the glasses for a long time and the demo is breathtaking. It's on a prototype Philips TV, which won't be available for a while; it would cost £10,000 (more than $A23,000) at the moment, but that's expected to be vastly lower when it reaches the mass market.
Orange has also emerged as an unexpected early player in the market, and I'm watching the demo in its offices. It believes 3-D TV will be key to the services it will be able to deliver to people's homes once its 100 Mbps fibre-optic internet service being trialled in Paris takes off; hence its interest. The display moves to a beer advert that looks as though you could lift it off the screen, and then there's a demo of a computer game in genuine 3-D with bullets flying at you. Four cynical journalists are silenced for once. Later Orange takes a 3-D photo of us and shows it to us on a hand-held camera, with the hint that phones will do this one day.
The technology works by throwing a different image to each eye and angling them so that one eye picks up one and the other picks up the other. There are in fact eight separate images, the technologists having added more after early users reported feelings of nausea and dizziness. "All of us have heard of 3-D for games, for example, but it's not really 3-D," says Philippe Delbary, head of 3-D services for Orange. "It's just an attempt to represent depth."
The new technology shows actual 3-D and it's impressive. But it's not totally natural; if the camera has focused on the foreground, it's not possible to focus on the background as there is no clear image there for your eye to pick up. Once you're used to that it looks perfect. But how quickly will the market embrace it?
A shortage of movies shot in the new 3-D format are likely to delay mainstream demand until well after 2010. There are only three big budget 3-D movies going into production in the next year that we know of : A Tin Tin movie each from directors Peter Jackson and Stephen Spielberg, and James Cameron's long-delayed, but eagerly anticipated Avatar.
But a decade from now, 3-D is likely to be the dominant format for just about everything you watch on TV.
Of course, there are people now developing technology that will pipe content straight into your brain, so you can watch movies and things we can't even anticipate right now, simply by closing your eyes, but that's another story.
