• by Mike Bloxham , Op-Ed Contributor, January 2, 2008

Having spent the period from the 19th of December to January 1st either on a plane or under several feet of snow in Park City, Utah, I've been blissfully off-duty and have had surprisingly little interaction with TV. I've used the TV screen (or similar) to watch DVDs, play games and--upon my return home while my wife and I waited for our bodies to tell us we were tired--catch up on a couple of hours of "Saving Grace" on the DVR, but live TV and trade news were wholly absent over my particular holiday break. It had nothing to do with the strike, and everything to do with chilling out and socializing (all of which was very welcome).

The downside, of course, is that I now face the task of writing this piece in the mode of a man returning to what we laughingly call normality after a spell in a kind of luxurious wilderness. So, rather than fall back on the tried and tested option of making a string of predictions for the coming year, offering a list of New Year media resolutions for myself or anybody else, or even writing about anything in the here and now, I decided to share a little treat I discovered in the mountains courtesy of my brother-in-law and gizmodo--a glimpse of something that may lie in our televisual future (and at the very least is pretty amazing when you watch the demo video, which is well worth the three and a half minutes).

Some of you will no doubt be familiar with previous offerings from Johnny Chung Lee, a PhD student from Carnegie Mellon, who is doing some wonderfully ingenious--yet simple and mind-blowing--things with the Nintendo Wii. In this demonstration, he shows how an ordinary flat-screen TV can appear to be genuinely capable of presenting three-dimensional imagery and take on the characteristics of a window rather than a screen, so that if you look at it from an angle, you don't just see the same content looking flatter--you actually get to see a different view (and apparently, different content).

You'll have to see it to get your heads around both the effect and the simplicity behind it--but for those of you who take the time to watch, just imagine what such a shift in some screen-based content could mean. Gestural navigation could become commonplace, and remotes as we know them would change radically. Can you imagine content being natively created with this sort of presentation and capabilities in mind? Whether it would be advertising, interactive programming or games, the creative opportunities and challenges could be great indeed. As the demo shows, this stuff would be seriously engaging. Interface design would be freed from the constraints of the X and Y axis more than ever before.

At one level, I've highlighted this particular piece of screen-based inventiveness as a bit of New Year fun. But on another level it's a reminder of some of the things that are coming down the pipe and which just might one day find their way into some part of our media mainstream, whether that's gaming or interactive TV or something else. And it's on that level that it serves as a gentle reminder that no matter how much more complex we think things have become in recent years, the times, they're still a-changing (only faster).

Hats off to Johnny Chung Lee for some seriously cool work and to the first people to find a use for it.

All the best for a stimulating and successful 2008.