At last year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, 3-D TV was being billed as the biggest thing since flatscreen television. This year, with 2-D television still overwhelmingly dominant, many of the largest consumer electronics firms were defensive about their 3-D strategies, pointing out that it took time for other technologies such as LED TVs and Blu-Ray to gather significant momentum too. Yet, there are good reasons for why those ultimately successful technologies were a little slow out of the gate. LED TVs launched into a crowded display marketplace where it provided an incremental change in picture quality, and Blu-Ray's early days were spent in a format battle with HD-DVD, with consumers reluctant to upgrade to new players until the dust settled.

Nobody has yet abandoned 3-D, instead rolling out the functionality to more models and product lines. And there has been growth in the number of 3-D enabled televisions sold, with Panasonic quoting a forecast that 32 percent of televisions worldwide would be 3-D enabled by 2014. But there's no good estimates for how many people are using the functionality to actually watch 3-D content: the capability typically comes built-in to the higher-end sets which people may be purchasing anyway simply for a bigger picture, or for the new TV feature that really does seem to be gaining momentum, the ability to access video on demand from the Internet.

Undaunted, Panasonic and Sony are probably the most aggressive manufacturers in pushing ahead with 3-D. Both companies are working to get more 3-D movies produced, opening centers in Hollywood where filmmakers can come to get technical guidance and assistance. They are also working to get consumers producing 3-D too, with a range of handheld still and video cameras that can capture 3-D images.

Sony also demonstrated some prototypes with autostereoscopic displays intended to eliminate what is probably the biggest issue with 3-D TV: the need to wear glasses. The prototypes included a portable Blu-Ray player and two large screen televisions. The results are impressive, but clearly not yet ready for prime time: viewing angles are still a little too restricted and the image can ripple disconcertingly if you shift your head while watching. In the meantime, smaller autostereoscopic displays are being built in the consumer cameras as view screens where the small viewing angle isn't a issue because typically only one person at a time is looking at the screen and can adjust it easily to their comfort.

Yesterday, Panasonic sold its first 3-D HDTVs at Best Buy in New York. For about $3,000, you can get a 50-inch 3-D plasma TV, a 3-D Blu-ray player and one pair of 3-D glasses (additional ones are available for about $150). Just the day before, Samsung announced that it will be selling three versions of 3-D TVs within the month and Sony stated that it will roll out 3-D TVs this June in Japan.

Samsung's sets will range from $1,699 to $6,999 and it will offer more versions in the spring and summer (some versions are already offered in South Korea). To coincide with the release of its first 3DTVs, Sony plans to release 3-D gaming software, most likely for its Playstation 3 system.

3-D Home Theaters have been available from Mitsubishi since 2007, at prices ranging between $1,500 and $4,200. Mitsubishi has also recently demoed a Nvidia driver that converts PC games in 3-D on its screens.

With so many 3-D TVs on the way, viewers will need something to watch. Satellite TV service DirecTV confirmed that it will offer three 3-D channels in June, while sports network ESPN plans to broadcast the soccer World Cup in June on its new 3-D channel.

The research firm DisplaySearch predicts that 3-D TVs will grow from the 0.2 million units sold in 2009, to over 1.2 million units this year, to 64 million units by 2018, with revenues forecast to reach $22 billion dollars by then. Currently, 3-D TV sets require viewers to wear 3-D glasses, but at some point in the future, consumers may be able to watch 3-D TV glasses-free.

On Monday Nokia launched a new research center based on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. The company already operates research centers in ten other locations around the world.

During a press briefing, chief development officer Mary McDowell said that, given the current economic climate, the new center will not pursue big-sky research but will focus on technologies that can be brought to market in three-to-five years. Areas of particular focus will include user interfaces, cognitive radio (a way to enable wireless devices to more efficiently share airwaves), technologies targeted at emerging markets, and what the company calls "context modeling" (applications that rely on information from sensors and GPS).

At Monday's launch event, the company offered demos of some research projects already under development at its Palo Alto, CA outpost, including a phone playing a 3D movie. As Duncan Graham-Rowe reports today on our site, 3D displays are going mobile. In the Nokia prototype, the effect is created by projecting a different image to each eye and it requires specially-created content. Phones that contain two cameras could allow users to create their own 3D content, said Henry Tirri, worldwide head of Nokia Research Center.

Watching movies seems to be the only marketable application for non-holographic 3D displays so far. Last week at the Frontiers in Optics conference in San Jose, I attended a session where researchers lamented the inability of such displays to crack into the market. At that session, Gregg Favalora, the founder of now-folded Actuality Systems, said that his company should have focused on more gee-whiz, easier-to-market applications like displays for corporate lobbies. (Instead, they did the engineering first, coming up with some pretty amazing but expensive devices for projecting volumetric images of medical scans used to plan cancer radiation treatments.) Watching a 3D movie on your cell phone, or snapping 3D images on the fly, might offer just this gee-whiz factor.

Nokia researchers also showed a project based in Bangalore. The company supplies 65% of the mobile services in India, and most of these phones are limited to calls and text messages--they don't offer GPS or Internet access. Deepti Chafekar, a researcher based at the Palo Alto Research Center, said the company is testing a set of location-aware services that are based on text messaging. For example, a user can send a text asking how to get somewhere, and receive directions in the form of a text message. User location is determined by proximity to cell towers. Another service being tested in Bangalore lets users display their location to someone they're texting with.