Electronics powerhouse Samsung recently unveiled a three-dimensional viewing experience that stirred many among the tech-journo crowd witnessing the event. Apparently the content, a Tiger Woods smack, came at them so fast and stunningly real that a ‘fore’ wasn’t heard from behind the goggles. Yes, goggles are still with us but the technology is getting pretty sweet, especially for over-cashed gamers who want nothing but the latest. We’ve seen some high-profile cinematic 3-D this past year, notably U2’s concert, and we’re likely to see Samsung and others bring the experience into the living room.

“After a century and a half of intermittent research, three-dimensional television is so close, you may feel you can reach out and touch it.

Some people watching the demonstration at Samsung’s digital media and telecoms research park in Suwon, an hour south of Seoul, do try to grab the animated images of approaching spacecraft, anthropomorphic cars and blobby aliens. It makes them look even sillier than the oversize goggles they have to wear to get the 3D effect. But the experience is so riveting that none of them cares. “It feels really real,” declares one normally sceptical French technology journalist as he tries on the goggles for a third viewing.

The target early adopters for 3D TV are, anyway, the affluent young men who have redefined cool to include computer games. No longer geeky, this business will be worth $46.5bn (£23.6bn) by 2010, almost half as much as the $104bn filmed-entertainment market, and it’s growing faster. High-end games, like most animated films today, are created using CGI (computer- generated images), and making them 3D is child’s play: you just instruct the computer to calculate each frame from two slightly different angles. The result is an illusion of depth which, whether you’re roaring around Monte Carlo in your F1 Ferrari or quarterbacking the Dallas Cowboys to NFL glory, makes a huge difference to the feel and enjoyment of a game.”

[From The Independent]