I can't imagine anything short of truly three-dimensional imagery, like a holodeck, improving upon my visual understanding of sports on 2DTV. Well, okay, it might be nice to have a better sense of how deep the fly ball is going, but other than that . . .
3DTV would have been a lot more compelling if it didn't require glasses. Totally ruins the immersion factor for me. Of course there are other reasons for its downfall, but I already wear glasses and don't need another pair for a gimmick which will possibly give me a headache.
3D glasses don't give me a headache, but it is annoying to have to use the eyewear. I seldom use the glasses I already own, outside of driving. To paraphrase a classic WF quote, "Well, I'm glad it's dead."
Sports is one of the few areas where 3D actually adds some value. I saw some sports footage in 3D a couple of years back and it--pardon the pun--added a whole new dimension to watching. Basketball, which to me is only exceeded in boringness only by watching grass grow or watching soccer, suddenly came to life with the depth. I wouldn't call 3D TV dead--there are still lots of 3D sets and movies being sold--but the lack of a broadcast channel for it is a major blow. Still, it could come around again. In a few years, there will be many more 3D sets in existence than there are now, so there might be more demand for 3D programming.
The fact that new home consoles are largely ignoring 3D displays definitely suggests that the appeal of the medium is wearing thin. I love 3d at the cinema because it increases the immersiveness, where the entire point is a large screen and a dark room and putting 100% of your focus on the action. In a home lounge room you just don't get that effect no matter how good the screen is. In my opinion the future lies with 2D for screens, with 3d headsets for games and virtual theatre viewing.
As far as I'm concerned, the best practical application of 3D displays with video games is to eliminate splitscreen during two-player. Like so:
3D isn't dead but it won't be more than a small niche until they can make it happen without glasses. I'm more interested in 4K than glasses free 3D, but my interest is more about the use of ultra high definition computer monitors than as a TV screen, though I'm not opposed to the added bonus.
Never liked 3D. I wear glasses and the fucking 3D glasses at the movies never fit right and is a constant distraction. Die, 3D bullshit marketing gimmick, DIE!!!
As someone who has monoscopic vision, I am unmoved by reports of the demise of 3DTV, be those reports greatly exaggerated or not.
I saw Dolby's "no glasses" 3DTV. It works pretty well, although there are "sweet spots" you have to sit in to get the full 3D effect. I think 3D is going to survive and it may eventually make it to broadcast. Sales of sets with 3D capability are accelerating, so a market may emerge in a few years. ESPN was quoted in the article saying they'd consider 3D again in the future. I'm not a huge fan of it--my HDTV is NOT 3D-capable, and I only watch movies in 3D at the theater if they seem likely to put it to good use--but I may be interested in it down the road.
Yeah, that's the problem with the no-glasses 3D displays. Their sweet spots are even narrower than the displays that use the 3D glasses.
Bleh...I just bought a really nice 3D TV a couple of months ago when I moved back to the states. It's not a major issue, the TV is great and looks good on my wall even without 3D. Also, as others have said, losing ESPN is a blow to the market, just not the death knell "haters" will try to use it as. It's like anything "new", adoption is slow.
Ya... so try and go buy one. You can't because they are not for sale anywhere. The only units out there are prototypes used in demo's like the one Paladin saw. There are lots of issues to work out before the technology is market ready. There are some very small, very expensive sets, but nothing that is large enough or cheap enough to be considered as realistically bringing the technology to market.
Tex is right; there's nothing on the market yet. It will happen, though. And, eventually, it will be cheap. Truthfully, cool as the "no glasses" version is, I think the glasses versions will work better for the foreseeable future. Of course, they may come out with other "no glasses" technology that works even better...
Well, look at LCD. We've had LC in watches since like, the 50's-60's. They could build an LCD TV in the lab around the 70's-80's or so. And it took fooooooreeever for them to come to the marketplace, and now they dominate. You really have to go out of your way to get anything CRT now. I'm sure they've got glasses-less 3-D in the lab right now, waiting for the next couple microchip generations to make it mass-producible.
Yeah, true. I wonder why it's taking them so long to put them out. I first saw a no-glasses 3D TV about 2 years ago and the Nintendo 3DS came out shortly before then.
Yes, though today's LCDs and the LCDs in the 60s are a looooooooooooong way apart. The technology was nowhere near ready for use in a TV until the 90s. (It has to do with how fast and small you can make the pixels.) You've probably heard about OLEDs (organic light-emitting diodes)...they're going to form the basis of newer displays. They're bright, they're pretty cheap and easy to make, and they can be put on flexible substrates (imagine a TV you can "roll up!"). 11 years ago, I worked for a company that was making OLED displays. The process then was good enough to make small displays (like, for car stereos), but it was still expensive, hard to do color, and the yields were pretty crummy. But people have been refining the process and the "recipe," and pretty soon we'll have big, cheap, bright OLED displays. My point is: it's a long road from making one device work in a lab to having six million of them work on a mass-produced panel. Yep, that technology's done. Big, heavy, lots of labor to assemble. Can you imagine how much a 60" CRT would weigh? A 40" CRT took several people to move. What's really needed is what has just arrived: 4K displays. The reason is this: "no glasses" displays use special lensing to send half of their pixels to your right eye and the other half to your left. If you do this with an HD display, you get, effectively, a "half-HD" image. But with a 4K display--which has twice the resolution in both dimensions--you get full HD to both eyes. So, when 4K sets are $999 at WalMart, the "no glasses" versions should become commonplace. (The Dolby proto I mentioned above? Yes, it was a 4K set. At the time, just to buy a 4K monitor would've been more than $10,000. I have no idea what Dolby's special lensing would add to the price...)
