The Cutting Edge: COMPUTERS / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : 3-D TV in Sight but Needs a Clearer Picture : Media: One technical challenge is perfecting system with image that can be seen as three-dimensional from any angle.

It’s Superman, or maybe Michael Jordan, seeming to fly into your living room. Or a surgeon on “ER” elbowing you out of the way as he moves in with his scalpel. Coming to your TV, it’s 3-D, the gimmick that amused moviegoers of the 1950s and then disappeared.

But even 150 years after the invention of the stereoscope, you’ll need special glasses to view three-dimensional wonders on your TV. On display at the National Assn. of Broadcasters convention, 3-D television could become a specialized service for broadcasters by 2005, said James Carnes, president of the David Sarnoff Research Center.

Carnes envisions a future where TV stations may decide to broadcast a sporting event in 3-D, but charge only those viewers who want to watch. He predicts the number of such viewers could reach 1 million by 2010.

“We’re not saying 3-D is around the corner or is easy now,” Carnes said. “We’re saying the digital world allows all kinds of services.”

To receive a 3-D show, Carnes said, a viewer would have to have a digital TV set and, under most scenarios, a set-top box that would decode the 3-D signal. And the viewer would have to wear polarized glasses.

Technology hasn’t developed to the point that viewers can get rid of the glasses, he said. And there are other technical challenges.

The biggest, Carnes said, is perfecting a system with an image that can be seen as three-dimensional from any angle.

Just like the stereoscope makers of the 19th Century, broadcasters would have to shoot with a double-eyed camera and transmit that way to give the appearance of depth. The impression of depth comes when the brain combines the two images. As in a stereoscope, a single image would show only what one eye would see.

A Super Bowl commercial appeared in 3-D years ago, but not too successfully.

The problem was, Carnes said, that the picture was messy for those millions without the special glasses. What they saw was off-color and muddy.