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.

The switchover to digital broadcast television gave TV manufacturers a huge boost as consumers replaced their old analog TVs to take full advantage of new high-definition signals. But with the United States and several other countries completing their switchovers in 2009, and the rest of the world soon to follow, manufacturers are scrambling to find new reasons for consumers to purchase televisions.

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Toshiba announced one of the most ambitious of these attempts, Cell TV, which will be available in the U.S. later this year. The set is built around a Cell processor, currently best known as the heart of Sony's Playstation 3 game console. When Sony, Toshiba, and IBM formed a consortium known as STI in 2001 to develop the Cell processor, it was envisioned that the Cell would find its way into many consumer multimedia applications.

The Cell features a general-purpose processor coupled to 8 special-purpose cores that can all run in parallel. These special-purpose cores were designed to handle the kind of high-speed computations needed to process video and audio in real time, but it has taken years longer than expected for Toshiba to harness this computing power in a television, in part because there wasn't a compelling application that needed all that processing power--over a hundred times more power than is available in a standard digital television.

Toshiba's new Cell TV can convert 2-D video to 3-D.

Toshiba thinks its has found that application, by creating a TV that can not only play movies made in 3-D, such as the James Cameron blockbuster Avatar, but can convert 2-D video to 3-D on the fly. The Cell processor will make guesses about what is foreground and what is background in a frame, and then create two stereoscopic images for 3-D viewing.

The Cell TV also comes with a built-in one terabyte hard drive and WiFi capability, so content can be downloaded from the Internet, recorded from a Blu-Ray player (also built-in), transferred from a PC, and then retransmitted to other nearby TVs. And just for good measure, there's a camera and microphone also built in so you can use the TV for video conferencing.

Sharp is taking a different tack to Toshiba's approach of chewing through huge amounts of processing power. Color displays today use red, green, and blue subpixels to create different colors. Sharp has added a fourth, yellow subpixel alongside the others, in what it's calling Quad Pixel technology. The extra pixel allows for a larger range of colors, and more colors within that range--while a RGB device can produce about a billion distinct colors, the addition of the extra pixel ups that to about a trillion colors. Sharp displayed a full line of production televisions, expected to start going on sale in the spring of this year, and at first glance at least, the result rivals OLED displays for quality.

Update 21:17 EST: During the afternoon and evening press conferences at CES, the momentum behind 3-D grew, with more and more major manufacturers announcing plans to release 3-D enabled television sets and other services in 2010. Samsung announced it also was bringing out a TV capable of converting 2-D content to 3-D in real time, and Panasonic announced a line of 3-D TVs along with a partnership with DirectTV to start broadcasting 3-D content to satellite TV viewers in June 2010. Panasonic also announced a consumer-level 3-D handycam that should be available later this year.

Sony declared a huge corporate committment to 3-D video, and showed an impressive demonstration of Jimi Hendrix performing at Woodstock that had been converted from 2-D to 3-D, along with a live performace by Taylor Swift that was (somewhat redundantly for those present) redisplayed in 3-D. Sony is partnering with Discovery Communications and IMAX to launch a 3-D television network in 2011, and is also partnering with ESPN to launch a 3-D sports channel in June of this year.

These annoucements are all driven in part by the adoption last month of a 3-D standard for Blu-Ray players, allowing movie studios, who released 10 original 3-D movies in 2009 in theaters, to package their movies without worrying about format wars between manufacturers.