Toshiba Launching Glasses-Free 3DTV by Year’s End

You’re an early adopter, right? Remember that LCD HDTV you bought to replace that faulty, wooden, 27-inch console television? Remember the HD-with-built-in-HDDVD-player TV you bought to replace that? Remember the HDTV you switched back to, wisely purchasing a separate Blu-Ray player? Remember the 3DTV you bought six months ago, flippantly disregarding the complete lack of content and criminal cost of 3D glasses?  Good times. You’ve torn your wallet all sorts of new orifices, haven’t you?

Well, don’t let it rest just yet. Toshiba, fancy folk as they are, are dropping a glasses-free line of 3DTVs this December in Japan.

Basically, it works exactly like the 3DS’ ‘parallax barrier’ – a layer of lenses scatters light to nine ‘sweet spots’ around the room, wherein you’ve gotta sit if you’re not interested in watching a blurry mess. Luckily, if you are interested, there’s probably like 100 spots around the room that totally suck. This technology isn’t exactly the cat’s ass just yet.

But either way, I’m glad Toshiba’s daring to take this route – if I were first of all silly enough to buy into this 3D nonsense, I certainly wouldn’t be willing to justify two hundred bucks for a pair of goddamned glasses. Glasses-free has to be the future  – nay – the present of 3D, or we’re all gonna look back in 30 years, as we sit back watching our prime time 2D programming, laughing together about how stupid we were to give a damn about Avatar.

Toshiba has no plans just yet to throw some of these televisual scrying panels our way just yet, but if you’re dead-set on picking one up, a twelve-inch model will set you back ¥120,ooo, and a 20-inch ¥240,000.

Do the math. That’s a freaking ton of ¥.