Three years ago I was shown a full working 3D plasma display model by LG at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and while it was an early concept in 3D TV technology it did work. Images literally jumped out of the screen.
People have been working on 3D without the glasses for a long time and the recent Philips demo is breathtaking. It's on a prototype Philips TV, which won't be available for a while; it would cost $25,000 at the moment, but that's expected to be vastly lower when it reaches the mass market by 2010. (Plasma screens when first launched were the same price).
Orange has also emerged as an unexpected early player in the 3D TV market. It believes 3D TV will be key to the services it will be able to deliver to people's homes once its 100Mbps 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 3D with bullets flying at you. Four professionally cynical journalists are silenced for once. Later, Orange takes a 3D photo of us and shows it to us on a handheld camera, with the hint that phones will do this one day.
