MasterImage 3D shows off its glasses-free 3-D technology on a Qualcomm tablet.

I wear glasses, so I hate putting another pair on over my specs to watch a 3-D flick. The idea of glasses-free 3-D technology is somewhat more appealing, but I’ve seen a few different iterations of it over the years and it always falls flat.

So I was curious but skeptical when MasterImage 3D, whose 3-D offerings include digital 3-D projectors for movie theaters, asked me to check out its take on it. It has built its technology into an Android-running Qualcomm tablet that it first showed off at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February, and it hopes to include the technology in smart phones starting late this year and tablets early next year.

Matt Liszt, MasterImage’s vice president of marketing, predicts it will add $10 to $15 to the cost of a smart phone, and about $30 to the cost of a tablet.

Generally, a parallax barrier—which has a number of slits in it—is placed in front of an LCD to create a glasses-free 3-D effect. To produce its version of the effect, MasterImage uses what it calls a cell-matrix parallax display, which uses groups of cells to form the barrier. The company says its method prevents blurred images and yields brighter colors. It also means you can watch in landscape or portrait mode.

I was shown a few short clips, including a snowboarding film trailer and the trailer for the Martin Scorsese film “Hugo.” The harsh lighting in my office made it difficult to watch (I kept seeing my reflection on the tablet’s screen), but once we turned off the light I got a better idea of what MasterImage is trying to accomplish.

The snowboarding clip gave me the best experience, with flying powder and sweeping mountainscapes rendered in crisp 3-D. Snowboarders and trees did seem to pop out of the screen. It was pretty cool.

Unfortunately, the colors didn’t always seem as bright or rich as they could be, and I felt I had to really focus on the screen and hold it straight in front of me to prevent any image blurring (and nausea). I worried this would also make it hard to watch with a friend.

I’m still not convinced most consumers will want the feature on their smart phones or tablets, especially if it means paying more for the device, but perhaps a more polished version of MasterImage’s technology will make a more vivid case for it.

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.