It’s a good week for 3D!
- ESPN announced their plan to broadcast (some) football games during this years World Cup match in 3D
- Avatar 3D already made a lot of cash and it seems that 4 out of the 10 3D movies last year were noted in the Top 10 best visited movies
- New 3D camera’s have been announced during CES
- New 3D displays, all stereo (with glasses!!) have been introduced during CES
- And of course: new 3D productions are announces, as well as new ‘conversion’ projects of existing 2D into 3D.
Reasons enough for a lot of press people to call, email and visit me this week to talk about the current 3D trends. Here in The Netherlands, football has always been the NR1 major sport, so the ESPN new’s about the World Cup in 3D was pretty exciting. This lead to some questions about how this will affect 3D penetration, at least in the Netherlands.
In my opinion we’re going to have a beautiful year for 3D, but it’s not going THAT fast. To really make a significant difference we need more than a handful of films and some football matches in 3D before 3D displays massively will be sold. So we will need more content, more shows, more movies, more 3D TV channels to really get this started. I concluded together with some journalists that the 2010 World Cup is just a bit too soon… for the 3D industry it would definetely be better if it took place just one year later or so.
However, I do believe we will see a quite big group of early adopters this year, everywhere around the world. Meanwhile we will also here internally do our R&D to make our autostereoscopic (no glasses…) 3D displays ready to also easily view the content as described above. At this point we can even already demo some of this.
The 3D train has departed!