Every year I go to the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas. A couple years ago I noticed that seemingly every hardware manufacture was either showing off a stereoscopic 3-d TV, camera or edit system and the ones who weren't were showing their roadmaps and talking about why their offering was going to be better  (once they get it to market). Last year it was even more prominent, As I walked around the floor I noticed that the normal schwag had been supplanted by 3-d glasses being handed out at every mega booth. Everybody who was anybody was pushing 3-d.

As the year progressed I decided to look into the trend a bit more and here's what I found. First of all, the new 3-d isn't your dad's pile the kids in the rambler and head out to see 'Creature From The Black Lagoon' at the local cineplex technology. No, glasses no longer have those kitschy blue and red lenses, directors for the most part are using the technique as a storytelling tool rather than a gimmick and most importantly you don't have to be in a theatre anymore to experience it, but you will still get a headache if you wear the glasses too long.

The new technology in LCD TV's mainly rely on polarized light. That is, the images projected to the left eye use light projected in one orientation and the right eye's images are all oriented the opposite direction. Add a pair of polarized glasses that only lets the correct eye see the correct image and viola! you have image dissidence. The new glasses are much cooler looking but also much more bulky and the polarization of half the light seems to limit the brightness of the sets when worn.

All the technical details aside, the question is really one of content. For sure 3-d is a great tool when used properly but right now there just isn't that much content to watch. A handful of movies come out in 3-d each year and there are very few choices for 3-d TV. ESPN has a new network in all 3-d and sports may turn out to be a great niche for 3-D. It seems ESPN thinks so anyhow. They produced the X games this summer in entirely 3-d production.

The bottom line, in this humble techno junkie's discerning opinion... Give it 3 years. If by that time every other TV network is talking about launching 3-d it might be the wave of the future, but I suspect we'll see only a handful of networks and perhaps a slightly larger handful of movies produced in 3-d. I'll keep putting my money into larger and sharper screens and only pay for 3-d when Imax has a must see.