Like many, Insight Media thinks the market will grow quickly, predicting sales of 3-D TVs to increase more than tenfold from about 3.4 million this year to 49.6 million by 2015.

I understand there’s a lot of hype and promising sales predictions surrounding 3-D technology, but we all need to take a closer look at the real world for a moment.

Three-dimensional images, or what we popularly call “3-D,” has actually existed as a tiny niche in film technology for more than 120 years. These gimmicky films were always expensive to produce and usually required viewers to wear special glasses to see the effect.

That technology has emerged in fits and starts. 3-D films were especially prominent in the 1950s in American cinema, and later underwent a worldwide resurgence in the 1980s and ’90s driven mainly by giant-screen IMAX theaters. Read the rest of this entry »