3-D -- it's closer than you think!

In a dark corner of the “Emerging Technology” section at the SIGGRAPH conference in San Diego, something interesting was hiding. I almost missed it – a little opening in black curtains. Stepping inside, I found two high-end HDTV’s playing what appeared to be fuzzy images. But when I donned the shutter glasses that were handed to me on the way in, I was surprised to see the best 3-D I’ve ever encountered – crisp, believable, and close.

3-D itself isn't news -- we've discussed it at length in the Digital Cinema discussions at ETC and elsewhere . What surprised me was that this 3-D was running on unmodified TV’s from Mitsubishi and Samsung that are in the market today. 3-D TVs are in the stores, but nobody seems to know it. Apparently, Texas Instruments, my hosts at the booth, are baking the 3D capability into DLP products, and Mitsubishi and Samsung are delivering it today.

"I thought 3-D was the thing that was going to keep people going to the theaters!” I’ve heard that from every person that I’ve discussed it with since coming back from SIGGRAPH. Everybody knew that 3-D would come to the home, but common wisdom said it would be 5 or so years, and in the meantime, 3-D would be a major differentiator for digital theaters. It seems that Moore’s law in the hands of TI has closed that gap –they can easily bake the capability in the DLP chipset -- so why wait for tomorrow?

I, for one, ran to my DLP TV to look for a VESA sync port to see if I had a 3-D capable TV without even knowing it.

I wondered, why would it be that people (like me) are buying TV’s that may be 3-D capable and not even being told about it? I would imagine that TI (and the manufacturers) are being low-key for now because not enough of the content is there to capitalize on the capability. But based on Disney and Dreamworks/Katzenberg’s recent efforts and statements, not to mention the efforts by George Lucas and James Cameron, there seems to be no question that the movies will be there in the near future. Based on my experience there, I'm convinced that it goes well beyond movies -- 3-D games will surely be a killer app for 3-D in the home.

We can only hope that the various industries find a way to come together on standards so we don’t have competing 3-D formats in the home, like we have elsewhere in the entertainment world.