Perfect 3D television and movies without those horrible glasses? They"re closer than you think. I"m sitting in Paris and some butterflies are fluttering towards me. Loads of them, perfectly clearly. I could allow one to land on my hand, or catch one of the rose petals being blown towards me - except I can"t, because they"re not real. They"re images on a TV in high definition - and in perfect 3D. They look life-sized and real, and I"m not wearing any silly spectacles other than the ones I wear all the time.
People have been working on convincing 3D without the glasses for a long time and the demo is breathtaking. It"s on a prototype Philips TV, which won"t be available for a while; it would cost £10,000 at the moment, but that"s expected to be vastly lower when it reaches the mass market. Philips isn"t the only company investigating the possibilities; Luxembourg-based SeeReal has also made technological developments in the area with its Viewing Window Technology, aiming to reduce the amount of pixels you need before 3D works.