What Happened to Glasses-Free 3D TV?

A brisk walk around the show floor at CES last week was all it took to confirm that the 3D TV craze is over. Vendors such as Samsung and Sony no longer thrust 3D glasses in everyone’s faces; most of their television sets weren’t showing 3D video at all. Instead, TV makers fixated on 4K displays, and how wonderful they looked without the assistance of eyewear. In fairness, 3D TV hasn’t gone away. As Sony Electronics President Phil Molyneux told my colleague Harry McCracken, it’s simply become a default feature embedded in all of the company’s new televisions. (The other way to look at it, of course, is that consumers are getting 3D TV whether they want it or not.) Now that 3D is a standard feature, TV makers are turning their attention to 4K as the next big thing. I wondered, then, what that meant for glasses-free 3D. At one point it seemed like the next natural step for televisions, but that was while 3D was still in vogue. Does the bursting of the 3D TV hype bubble spell doom for a glasses-free version? Not quite. I did see a couple of glasses-free 3D technologies at CES this year, and they both looked better than anything I’d seen before. Even so, they’re a long way off from becoming actual products that the average person can afford. The most impressive effort was a 55-inch, 4K glasses-free 3D TV prototype from Vizio, developed with Dolby and other undisclosed partners. Unlike other glasses-free panels I’ve seen in previous years (like the Toshiba model pictured above), Vizio’s set was comfortable to look at from anywhere, not just from a few specific angles. The TV did have several 3D sweet spots, and apparently the best place to watch was from about five to six feet away, but the effect simply became less pronounced or non-existent at other angles. The video itself remained crisp enough to watch. Although the 3D effect was somewhat mild in my demo, Vizio said users would be able to adjust the