Even for an industry used to hyperbole, 3D is having quite an effect. Avatar has raked in $2.6bn of ticket sales, and it took just three days for Alice in Wonderland to became this year's highest grossing film. Parallels with the switch from black and white to colour are rife, and it is not just cinemas and film studios getting excited. Yesterday, Sony announced it will join Panasonic and Samsung launching 3D televisions in the US this year.
The hope, particularly for Sony and Panasonic whose TV divisions lose money, is for higher TV sales. Consultancy iSuppli forecasts that shipments of 3D TV's will rise from 4.2m this year to 78m in 2015, or about two-fifths of the global flat-screen TV market. But the aim for manufacturers is also to sell kit for filming in 3D, as well as more Blue-Ray discs and PlayStations.
Some perspective is required, though. Consumers in developed markets have just been through the switch to digital: virtually all Japanese households and up to 60 per cent of US and European homes now own a flat-screen TV. A new set is bought more often than the 15 to 20 years a cathode ray tube lasts, but the lifespan is still seven to 10 years. And while some high-definition broadcasts began a decade ago, sales did not start to take off until 2004.