Will 3D save Blu-Ray?

If you thought the format war was over when Blu-Ray killed HD-DVD, you were wrong, as now a far greater battle is taking place: streaming and downloads vs. physical media. On one side we have services like Netflix which offer hi-def movies streaming straight to a consumer’s DVD, which is a welcome alternative to $35 Blu-rays.

But there could be a light on the horizon for the format, and it comes in the form of…sigh, 3D. Currently there are only 30 3D Blu-ray titles on the market right now, but that number is increasing rapidly due to everyone agreeing on the process of formatting 3D on the disc.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen an association turn out a spec in such rapid time,” Blu-ray exec Parsons said. “The alternative would have been two or three different ways to do 3D on a disc — and that’s death to a format. Everyone understood that could happen. We avoided what could have been an ugly, messy situation.”

But is home 3D really the revolution analysts are claiming it will be? I recently had the displasure of viewing a Sony 3D TV with $100 shutter glasses. I watched a movie about fish for a few minutes, the depth looked fine, but it wasn’t anything to make me shell out $3-5K for the TV and $40 for the Blu-ray. Afterwards though? I felt incredibly dizzy and nauseous, something that’s never once happened to me watching 3D in the theater. I literally had to sit down I was so disoriented, and after my internal mechanisms righted themselves after ten minutes, I was thoroughly turned off to the idea. That was ust my personal experience, but I wonder if others have been affected the same way.

Do you think home 3D will eventually become mainstream, or will 3D TVs need to go glasses free first? And will you spend $40 to buy a new movie on 3D Blu-ray? That’s 2/3rds of a video game at that point, which offers anywhere from 5x to 50x the number of hours of entertainment.