Glasses-Free 3D TVs Said To Be Coming By 2015

3D may be the "big thing" right now, but it's still too early to tell whether it's consumers that are driven the demand, or the companies that are invested in the technology. Yes, 3D cinema has gone over well, but it's still too early to tell whether even that is just another fluke. Remember, the world has seen 3D in cinemas before, and it never did manage to sustain a growth pattern.

One of the major gripes about 3D, including NVIDIA's own 3D Vision system, is the glasses that you have to wear. There's just no avoiding the fact that wearing glasses to enjoy content is a huge pain, and for many, it's simply unacceptable. The solution isn't easy, but it's out there in prototype form. It's "Glasses-Free 3D," and it's exactly what it sounds like: 3D, without the glasses.


Intel, among other companies, have demonstrated glasses-free 3D solutions before, but none are advanced enough to get out onto the market and rival the glasses-based solutions now. Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) displayed a 42-inch glasses-free 3D LCD TV this week, using parallax barrier technology to create the 3D effect on the TV, and according to a local research group, this kind of technology could be suitable for the market place by 2015. That's obviously still a very long ways away, but it's possible that the glasses-based 3D craze will be entirely over and done with by that point.

What do you think about the future of 3D? Does it even have a future? Or only with a glasses-free savior?

Tags:  HDTV, TV, 3D, Sales