3-D TV was a gimmick, and it failed. After every television manufacturer went all-out with manufacturing and marketing, the entire industry retreated. But I still think that failure had nothing to do with 3-D itself. It was a lack of good content. And it was the glasses–hose silly, silly 3-D glasses.

Full Turn is a project by ECAL student Benjamin Muzzin. It’s a 3-D screen that, rather than using the typical active shutter glasses or parallax effects, creates the illusion of glowing, holographic sculptures simply by spinning extremely fast.

You see, the Full Turn monitor is actually two monitors sandwiched back to back. As they rotate, the system can exploit a human’s persistence of vision, transforming the most basic lines on the screens into complex, radial animations as the spinning light blurs in our brains.

Of course, Panasonic could never spin full plasmas in our living rooms (could you imagine a dual, 50-inch screen flying through the family room the first time a bolt came loose?). But I’d argue that Muzzin has created more delight through this clever kinetic interaction than most of us ever had watching a Blu-ray of Avatar through goggles that gave us a headache; and there’s a reason for that: On most 3-D TVs, the third dimension was another feature. On Full Turn, 3-D is the experience.

See more here.

[Hat tip: Creative Applications]