I want you to close your eyes and imagine yourself in 2014.
The Ice Bucket Challenge is taking off. Taco Bell started serving breakfast, and while it’s generally fine, you know deep down that it could be better.
You’re excited to see Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” with your friends in a few days. You hear it’s in 3D — just like everything else. There are 3D TVs, too, and your tech-obsessed friend was just bragging about buying one.
Now you’re back in the present day (sorry).
Taco Bell is still serving so-so breakfast, but these days, the word for it is “mid.” You’re occasionally handed a pair of 3D glasses along with your movie ticket, but most flicks are limited to two dimensions.
Your tech-obsessed friend recently replaced their 3D TV with one of the best OLED TVs on the market.
Once upon a time, 3D TVs were everywhere. These days, they’re relics — quietly treasured by collectors and enthusiasts but mostly joked about by those who remember.
Having covered the TV business for over a decade, I had a front row seat to the rise and fall of 3D TVs. But lately, it’s starting to feel like the air has shifted.
What we can learn from the failure of 3D TVs
To say that 3D TVs were fussy is a bit of an understatement.
There are many reasons for the demise of 3D TVs, but you can basically file them into three distinct categories: finicky hardware, high cost of entry and a lack of 3D content.
Let’s start with the hardware. While cutting my TV-testing teeth, I spent a ton of time with 3D sets from brands like Samsung and LG. To say that 3D TVs were fussy is a bit of an understatement.
Obviously, there were the glasses. Generally speaking, these came in two flavors: active and passive.
To put it in simple terms, active 3D glasses — like the ones used by Samsung during the 3D TV era – worked by rapidly opening and shutting each lens in an alternating fashion. This would happen in sync with images on the screen, each frame intended for a single eye.
Passive 3D glasses, on the other hand, are somewhat closer to the pair you wear at the cinema. Their polarized lenses merge two off-set images, creating an illusion of depth. I remember using these when testing 3D TVs from LG.
Both styles had their advantages and disadvantages. Active specs offered a full-HD (1080p) 3D experience, but were heavy, battery-operated and seriously pricey.
Passive glasses were — and still are — lightweight. They’re super cheap, too, which made them easy to stock up on or replace when they broke (which happened often in my testing lab). Unfortunately, they also halved the picture’s vertical resolution, resulting in a blurrier image than what was available with active glasses.
Aside from the fact that neither eyewear option was ideal, the 3D TV experience just never felt like a 3D night at the cinema. Even if you owned a TV that leveraged easily accessible, passive 3D glasses, you still had to have enough on hand for all of your friends and family.
Common TV performance issues, like a lack of brightness or a narrow viewing angle, were exacerbated by 3D viewing. The glasses naturally dimmed the picture and made it all the more important that each viewer had a front-and-center viewing position.
Cost was another issue. While 3D TVs eventually started falling in price on their way out, they were prohibitively expensive for most people — even before you factored in the potential cost of additional glasses.
And despite the ubiquity of 3D movies in the early 2010s, it was hard to sell people on a new, expensive technology whose use cases were limited. Think about how much casual TV-watching you do on a regular basis compared to lights-off, sit-down movie nights.
More often than not, enjoying a 3D TV meant picking out a 3D Blu-ray, possibly charging up the battery of your 3D glasses and dimming the lights. It was a special ritual — they weren’t broadcasting “Parks & Recreation” in 3D.
Now that we’ve done the post-mortem, we know what 3D TVs need to do to come back from the dead.
How 3D TVs could stage a comeback (and why I think they will)
It’s safe to say that, of the two types of 3D glasses, passive pairs would be the better option in a hypothetical 3D TV revival. They’re cheap, easier to wear and don’t require charging. At the end of 3D TV’s life, LG had even developed passive, 4K 3D technology whose resolution was halved into a crisp 1080p picture.
But what if we did away with 3D glasses altogether?
At CES this year, I got to spend time with a glasses-free 3D monitor, the Samsung Odyssey 3D. The monitor analyzes 2D content — video games, old episodes of “Friends” — and converts it all to a surprisingly convincing 3D picture by way of a lenticular lens. With a front-facing stereo camera, the Odysseey 3D tracks viewers’ eyes to maintain the effect.
As impressed as I was with the Odyssey 3D’s performance, I have some serious questions about whether or not this technology would fit into most folks’ living rooms. Most people are squeamish about the prospect of a camera on their TV — and understandably so. It’s also unclear how the technology would scale up to bigger screen sizes, or how well it would hold up while an entire room full of people are watching.
But when we talk about big-screen TVs, it’s hard not to think about how everyone from influencers to TV brand ambassadors talks about bringing the theater experience home.
Movies are piped into our homes weeks after they debut in theaters, and people are buying bigger screens to enhance the home theater experience. 3D movies never fully went away, either; they’re still a part of moviegoing culture.
3D TVs have an uphill battle in front of them.
Recently, Tom’s Guide Global Editor in Chief Mark Spoonauer wrote about the experience of watching a 3D movie on the Apple Vision Pro.
“If you give this headset a shot and see just a few minutes of a 3D movie through it,” Mark wrote, “you’ll wish you had one.”
At the time of publishing, Mark reported that there were over 40 3D movies available through the Disney+ Vision Pro app. It seems that, despite widespread acknowledgement that 3D TVs are dead, there’s quietly been an appetite for 3D movies — at least at the local cinema and in VR apps.
3D TVs have an uphill battle in front of them. Without the convenience factor that movie theaters and VR headsets offer, there’s not much of a marketing opportunity. Without major brands taking another run at 3D TVs, there’s not much of a reason to produce and distribute 3D content to people’s homes.
That said, I've also been in the game long enough to recognize just how determined major TV brands are to set themselves apart from the competition, or to be the first to adopt new technology — or resurrect old technology.
The return of 3D TVs isn't a guarantee, nor is it imminent. But in recent years, I've seen enough rhetoric about bringing the moviegoing experience into our living rooms to believe that 3D TVs are truly dead for good.
And if they make their return, I'll be there — with or without glasses on.
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