No-Glasses 3-D Jumps Out at Customers

NEW YORK (MainStreet) -- With all due respect to the 3-D industry, the notion of fooling the eye into seeing depth when there is none is a nonstarter. Sure, movies such as Spider Man, Star Wars and The Adventures of Tintin keep experimenting, and equipment makers such as Sony(SNE) , Toshiba, LG and dozens of others huff and puff the 3-D thing. But for the average consumer? Nobody cares.

It's not that 3-D TV isn't cool. It's just that our silly, shortsighted American economy has treated consumer earnings power like a disease. And with that kind of assault, nobody has the coin these days for a new 3-D set. So, to paraphrase Yoda, "Languish this technology will."

Toshiba's unveiling a 3-D TV that might just find a home in your business.

But that does not mean 3-D is dead. Such displays can fill an important niche: as a point-of-sale tool for a business, say, on a sales floor or in an office or lobby.

To get a feeling for how 3-D might work for your business, the folks at Toshiba invited me around for a demo of their latest state-of-the-art 3-D display; a 55-inch, so-called auto-stereoscopic 3-D TV that -- get ready for this -- requires no 3-D glasses to use.

That's right. A decent-quality 3-D image without the stupid glasses. That got my attention.

What you get
If you know what you are doing, these glasses-free 3-D TVs can most definitely rock the business house.

Right away it's clear the wonky, "Nobody is going to want to waste a moment with this 3-D nonsense" vibe is gone. The demo 55-incher I saw offered a simply excellent viewing experience. The versions of Up and Coraline I saw were very sharp.