Perfect 3D TV and films without horrible glasses

People have been working on convincing 3-D without the glasses for a long time and the demo is breathtaking. It's on a prototype Philips TV, which won't be available for a while; it would cost £10,000 (more than $A23,000) at the moment, but that's expected to be vastly lower when it reaches the mass market.

And Philips isn't the only company investigating the possibilities. Luxembourg-based SeeReal has also made technological developments in the area with its Viewing Window Technology, aiming to reduce the amount of pixels you need before 3-D works.

Orange has also emerged as an unexpected early player in the market, and I'm watching the demo in its offices. It believes 3-D TV will be key to the services it will be able to deliver to people's homes once its 100 Mbps fibre-optic internet service being trialled in Paris takes off; hence its interest. The display moves to a beer advert that looks as though you could lift it off the screen, and then there's a demo of a computer game in genuine 3-D with bullets flying at you. Four cynical journalists are silenced for once. Later Orange takes a 3-D photo of us and shows it to us on a hand-held camera, with the hint that phones will do this one day.

The technology works by throwing a different image to each eye and angling them so that one eye picks up one and the other picks up the other. There are in fact eight separate images, the technologists having added more after early users reported feelings of nausea and dizziness. "All of us have heard of 3-D for games, for example, but it's not really 3-D," says Philippe Delbary, head of 3-D services for Orange. "It's just an attempt to represent depth."

The new technology shows actual 3-D and it's impressive. But it's not totally natural; if the camera has focused on the foreground, it's not possible to focus on the background as there is no clear image there for your eye to pick up. Once you're used to that it looks perfect. But how quickly will the market embrace it?