Jeash, you guys are funny dissing on the idea of 3D TV at home as worthless, or even worse than worthless. I think that's like someone 50 years ago complaining about color TV being a waste of money and a scam by companies to sell new TVs when everyone already had a perfectly good 20" black and white TV.

3D TV will eventually be a big deal. There are a few technology barriers to it taking over the world but they are not nearly so difficult as the barriers the industry had to overcome to build large flat panel TVs. Remember how painful that was? It took 20 years to crawl our way from terrible streaky monochrome 9" LCDs to the beautiful color 65" LCDs we can buy at Costco for ~$3K today. It's fairly trivial to build a 3D TV that works well with glasses. These sets will not cost more to build once they are in production. All they are doing is interspersing two video streams (right eye, left eye), synchronized with the filters in the glasses. So they needed double the refresh rate, but the TVs are already at 240 Hz so that isn't a problem. And they need double the data input bandwidth which requires a new version of HDMI but is well within the capability of current electronics tech. And they need the sync xmitter to tell the glasses when to flip the filters. No big deal, no real extra manufacturing cost. Yes, the manufacturers will charge an extra premium for a few years to include the feature, but that won't last long.

But people are not going to want to wear annoying glasses except when they are seriously focused on watching a movie or playing video games. The real key tech that needs more work are the screens that through some magic use a slotted lensing system on the front of the screen to produce 3D without glasses. It sounds like that tech is feasible, and if it could be produced, I believe it will eventually make 3D screens a part of our lives everywhere (computers, TVs, phones, everything).

I suspect eventually 2D filmed movies will be "3Dized" just like black and white movies are routinely "colorized". Just as computers enabled rapid, efficient colorization, the same approach could be used to assign depth to various objects on the film and computer generate the left/right eye video streams.

Until then, new movies will increasingly be filmed in 3D HD. And games will adopt 3D immediately since the gameplay will be dramatically more compelling.

This is good technology! And the companies that bring it to us deserve to be rewarded.