Well, I believe that normal flat TV screens are a great and social way to share visual information. A moving painting. I think it is much easier to have personal Head Mounted Displays for the full 3D immersion.

After doing some searching today I could only find Sensics that makes high resolution HMD's the prices are just a little prohibitive. 20k and up.
But like with anything scaling technology can bring the price down well under $500 I imagine.

http://sensics.com/technology/breakthrough.php

If accurate head-tracking was performed like they do in the Razer Hydra motion controller you would have a winner. Lag free hi-res head tracking combined with a panoramic HMD would be no good for movies (Although I wonder if they should use it to keep the screen steady so you can scan the screen) it would do wonders for fps games.

Bouncing light off a screen is ok to deliver a moving painting but very ill equipped to deliver a personalized realistic 3D visualization. A personal viewer makes much more sense. Here is hoping personal video googles will take off after all. Now people are "trained" to watch 3D TV with shutter goggles this might not be such a stretch.

Thanks for that deep insight. Slashdot worthy.
Lol 1000 years from now they will think the star-wars movie script was some kind of bible.

Yes, that is another important one. I have been doing some experiments on that as you can see in this video on my youtube channel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBdtPz2V_vY

Yeah, that as a bit presumptuous I agree. "One way to solve..." would have been a better choice of words.
Just tried to point out that you need to match focal depth with stereo depth. The way in which to do that is indeed open.

As I wrote on Gizmag:

As an armchair scientist, I have been experimenting with screens for quite a while. Trying to plot out what factors are involved for 3D display and depth perception.

I have been following this whole 3D craze with dismay because TV builders have failed to address the fundamentals.

Stereo vision is only one aspect of 3D vision and in fact not even nearly as powerful as some other effects. Although there are many causing discomfort the light ray divergence is most relevant.

Your eye also tells you how far away something is by the amount of work it needs to do to bring it into focus. The lens in your eye bends incoming light rays so they focus on your retina similar to how a photo camera works. To get the best possible 3D effect in commercial flight simulators, they make use of collimated displays.

Consider the pixels on your LCD screen a light sources. Take a pixel and you can consider it to be a light point that radiates light in all directions. After all you want to see the screen at many viewing angles. So the light rays diverge and the lens in your eye needs to bring the rays that hit the eye together to focus on your retina.

A collimated display emits light rays that are more or less parallel. Your eyes can relax more in order to focus which is an very powerful depth suggestion.

Stereo vision and focal distance need to match in order to get rid of the worst nauseating effect. Stereo vision may suggest something is in front of the screen but your eye disagrees because it needs to focus on the screen. These two inputs are fighting each other continuously.

The only way to solve this problem is if we can build a display with an adjustable micro lens in front of each screen pixel. If we can control the light ray divergence from a single pixel in real-time then we can match the stereo vision with focal distance and finally get rid if this mismatch. Added benefit is that displays like this can be adjusted for your eyes so you can watch TV without your glasses. They would make really good computer monitors.

A pixel worth of imagery normally only contains R, G and B channels for Red, Green and Blue light that combine to any color. In addition each pixel needs a fourth channel indicating the depth of the pixel. You may find the focal depth powerful enough without the need for stereo vision. You can try this simply by closing one eye and look around and notice how your eye adjusts to things nearby and far away.

You're not a MS shill, quite impressed by your reasoned reply.

On TCP/IP. My point was that at the point the Internet hit mainstream MS failed to recognize it's significance. To be fair. I believe windows 95 did come with TCP/IP support but it was not enabled or installed by default.

I mentioned Virtual earth because it was a 3D world model introduced with a lot of noise and recently abandoned. I know that all these companies are struggling to make money of this stuff but MS looks fickle when they declare a standard and then walk away a few years later because nobody wants to play their game. Even with Google Earth the pressure is on because new technology is making 3D map generation easier and better as shown by OVI maps 3D

The word failed is probably a poor word to use. But when a company loses a decent market share (look at MSIE) and then decides to walk away from it it doesn't only affect them, it affects those that build on that technology. Choosing technology these days is as much about continuity as it is about feature and power.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95

"Windows 95 originally shipped without Internet Explorer, and the default network installation did not install TCP/IP, the network protocol used on the Internet."
I recall there was a third-party app that made access to the internet easier and many ISP's would ship that on their promotional Diskette.

You got a point though, MS might do better on the server front. Yet, various multimillion dollar projects that I consult for have steered away from MS server technology such as Sharepoint.

Currently I am converting a rather old web application based on the ISAPI which acts as a plugin to IIS that obviously depends on IIS to run. My client has come to rely on this application heavily over the years and increasingly feels his business is exposed to risk and MS technology is dropped so easily. The new tools for this app will be based on open source mainstream products with a wide support base and a proven track record.

Like previous comments, you assume that I am one of those apple trolls. Not so, I don't have a single Apple device at home or at work. All of my PC's run a windows OS.

The point is that it no longer matters what OS you are running because applications move to the web. Never mind the OS, in fact even the web browser won't matter provided it is compliant with current standards.

I have never been open to use Linux because I don't want to deal with learning a new OS. But if all I interact with is a browser, then I don't care what OS is running underneath provided it does the job well.

Google's Chrome seems to go in that direction where there is logic between the browser and PC hardware that is becoming invisible to the user and irrelevant to the user. Modern laptops now often have a quick boot feature launching a quick shell (I suppose a flavour of linux) and a bunch of common apps among which a browser so in a way you can already buy a PC without paying the OS tax and have it functional out of the box.

Microsoft did not realize the significance of TCP/IP when they released windows 95
Microsoft rolled out their .net fat client platform still thinking fat clients is where it is at.
Virtual Earth failed to compete with Google Earth
Failed mobile phones
Failed MP3 players

Feel free to add to the long list.

Siverlight is just a small blip because it did not get the uptake MS had hoped for. They do this all the time. They try to compete on all fronts and never excel anywhere. MS product path is littered with abandoned poorly executed ideas some of which might have made it if they only committed to it. I feel sorry for those software companies that put all their eggs in the MS basket because their .net codebase will in the not too distant future be obsolete too.

It should be clear to everyone that operating systems are no longer significant. Running fat clients locally is no longer where it is at. PC's and Laptops are no longer the core device on which applications run. So the MS tax (Windows) on every PC will come to an end. MS is already far too late to change their direction with Windows and if MS doesn't get onto the web based bandwagon with MS Office quickly they will lose that profitable market as well.

It is a pity but unavoidable that successful companies get too big and too slow to respond to changes. Although it is thanks to MS that computing has become so accessible to the masses. They failed to pay attention over the last decade and foolishly thought they could direct their market. Developers trusting anything that MS put out over the last 5 years will wish they had not, no matter the promised potential.

Google was the new kid on the block with some amazing innovation but look closely at Google today and you can see the same warning signals. It is only a matter of time before the next company will take over from them.