3D in Your Home!

Many TV's now being sold have the capability to display 3D (also known as "stereo," much like stereo audio for your ears).  Within the past few months, a 3D Blu-ray standard was settled on, so you'll be seeing some 3D Blu-ray players soon.  If you happen to be an early adopter of both of those, you'll still be waiting on 3D content to come out on Blu-ray.

To solve this problem, you could pick up nVidia's 3D Vision package.  This is a box set that comes with an infrared emitter, 3D glasses, and some drivers.  With this package, you can run any game you have one your computer in 3D.  Yes, that's right, you read correctly - any game you currently have on your computer can be viewed in 3D on a 3D capable display.  Nvidia has some 3D ready displays listed on their website, but you'll be seeing a lot more soon.  This year at CES (Consumer Electronics Show, which I had the privilege of going to this year), every TV manufacturer was pushing their 3D displays.  Some even could be making the nVidia package obsolete, as the Samsung 2010 model 3D-ready displays can take any 2D content and turn it into 3D real-time.  Neither of these are really great stereo, but it is 3D.

I doubt that 3D will catch on in homes quickly, but I believe that it will eventually.  Marketing departments have a lot of informing to do in the meantime.  Most people have never seen good stereo, and until the general public either sees good stereo or is well informed of it, adoption in homes will be limited.  Movie theater stereo is getting better, but what you would buy for your home would be active stereo instead of the movie theater polarized stereo.  See my blog post on "3D Video Explained" for more about this.  Active stereo is much better than polarized stereo, so in-home 3D has a good chance of being much better than a movie theater if you can deal with not having a huge cinematic display, unless of course you opt for a nice 3D projector - then you can just have it all.