There are news reports this morning that Microsoft is looking to acquire the Israeli startup 3DV Systems, makers of the Z-cam depth sensing camera. Whilst their interest may initially be in the gaming space to support the X-box, expect to see this technology moving into broader applications in the coming months. This field is full of startups, many in stealth mode, and this will not be the last acquisition we see in 2009. As I said at the start of the year – 3D is going to be BIG!

In fairness, the goofy glasses are pretty high tech these days, with fancy LCD shutters turning on and off at warp speed to control what images I receive and confuse my brain. But at a couple of hundred dollars a set would you want to leave them on the sofa for the next teenager to sit on? I think not. They are heavy, they are ugly and they are definitely not cool!

Over the next few weeks I will be looking at and commenting on a whole variety of 3D technologies and giving my verdict, but on this one I’m prepared to stick my neck out and give it a full blown raspberry!

What do you all think? Will they catch on? Will I be forced to appear in public with goofy glasses as penance for my stupidity and lack of imagination? We’ll see!

Firstly, I think 2009 is going to be the year of 3-D. I’ve been watching this space all of last year and it is a natural progression from the gestural computing that I observed progressing so much in 2008. I’m not talking about the fifties-style 3-D glasses, but something a little more sophisticated. We will see 3-D in computer gaming, in entertainment, on the desktop in dozens of different ways. The world may have been flat up to now, but things are going to get more interesting from here on out.

Secondly (and I have commented on this before) I think the combination of technology advancement, increasing user acceptance and the pressures arising from the current economic woes, will result in a big increase in the use (however unwillingly) of virtualised collaboration environments – everything from web conferencing through virtual worlds.  I suspect we will also see some progress towards virtual seminars/conferences – 2008 saw some experiments but 2009 will see a lot more I suspect.

Third I think 2009 is going to see a lot of smaller, less obtrusive computing environments. Some of these will be embedded into other systems (home entertainment for example) but also more netbooks (I was browsing down at the local office supplies store (how sad!) and almost ended up buying one recently – it was so cute and ridiculously inexpensive!). Do I need another notebook? Not really, but at that price it barely matters! The continuing fall in the price of solid state memory helps to fuel this trend (more SSD drives even for larger notebooks I expect) and it is going to be difficult to resist the coming generation of smartphones. At what point does a smartphone do the same job as a netbook? The other important element in this mix is the arrival of an application delivery mechanism like App Store and the wealth of applications that it makes available and accessible to non-technical users. This is an explosive cocktail of trends that will combine together very effectively.

Well, there we are (three is enough for now!). I’ll try to come back in 12 months and see how well I did!