"3D comes to your living room" was supposed to be one of the biggest stories at CES 2010, and indeed it was—the promotional push by Panasonic, LG, Samsung, Sony, and a few smaller panel makers was massive, with multimillion-dollar booth setups intended to awe conference-goers and start the technology off with a bang.

Unfortunately for the billions that have been pumped into R&D and manufacturing for 3D TVs, the normally hype-friendly press has been completely underwhelmed by what its sees after donning the ubiquitous shutter glasses here on the show floor. The collective response from the early adopter crowd at every booth has been, "Meh, I'm not going to buy one of these."

But because of the specific approach that the industry has settled on, consumers don't have to be bowled over for 3D TV to wind up in every living room. Here's a look at the current state of 3D TV, and at why it's coming to a screen near you whether you like it or not.

Everyone bet on the same 240Hz LCD horse

Sharp, LG, Samsung, Sony, and the list goes on. Everyone is on board.

With a few possible niche exceptions, the entire consumer electronics industry seems to have settled on a single implementation of 3D TV: active shutter glasses (vs. the passive glasses used in cinema 3D).

The basic idea is that the 3D display shows video as a series of alternating frames: left eye, right eye, left eye, right eye. The viewer then dons a pair of powered shutter glasses, which block out one eye or the other on alternate frames. The glasses sync to the display via infrared—there's a transmitter on the bottom of the display panel and a receiver in the glasses.

The main disadvantage of this shutter approach is that the active glasses need a battery. Fortunately, the battery is very small (like a watch battery) and for most of the glasses I tried the size and weight were comparable to passive 3D glasses. The advantage of the active shutter approach is that you can watch video in 1080p; in contrast, passive glasses that use polarized light only let you do 1080i. (Remember this advantage, because, as I'll explain later, it's the key to why 3D TV will succeed even if it fails.)

Except for Panasonic, which is betting heavily on plasma technology, the rest of the market has settled on LED LCD at 240Hz (120Hz per eye) as the display technology of choice for 3D TV. You'll also need a Blu-ray player that's compatible with the new Blu-ray 3D spec and that uses HDMI 1.4, which is a higher-bandwidth variant of HDMI that's needed for transmitting the alternating frames at increased frequencies.

Samsung and Sony both demonstrated AMOLED-based 3D TVs, also based on the active shutter approach, in sizes from 15 inches to 32 inches, but there are apparently no plans to commercialize the technology any time soon. These were merely prototypes to show what's possible right now with AMOLED.

Unfortunately for both consumers and the industry, only the smaller AMOLED 3D displays blew anyone away. The 3D effect on the 15-inch AMOLED at the Samsung booth was just mind-bendingly good at the proper distance; likewise with the larger AMOLED at the Sony booth.

Plasma was next on the quality spectrum, but with the Panasonic TVs I didn't feel like I wanted to watch very much TV that way. I could see using the 3D effect for the occasional movie, but the effect wasn't so compelling that I could imagine watching everything in 3D.

LED LCD was last on the list, with the effect at various booths ranging from "hmmm... yeah, I could see using this," to "I'm going to have a headache if I don't get these glasses off immediately."

AMOLED 3D: more like this, please

Side and angle views of Samsung's 32 inch AMOLED 3D TV

As I said above, the AMOLED displays were the clear winners at 3D. Right now, though, it's not clear to me why the distance and ambient lighting seemed to matter as much for the 3D effect as they did, but they certainly were crucial.

Stepping back from the small Samsung AMOLED produced a very clear 3D picture that was so real that I wanted to lick the shiny little Pixar aliens, but when I stood in front of the 32 inch AMOLED the effect was diminished (Samsung had the glasses tethered to prevent theft, so I couldn't experiment with distance for the 32 inch display).

At the Sony booth, the large AMOLED screen was tucked back into a little viewing booth that blocked out ambient light. I don't know if it was the ambient light blocking or the distance at the Sony booth, but the 3D effect was very good.

Too bad we won't see AMOLEDs like this on the market any time soon. As I reported in March of last year, the commercialization of OLED has been delayed by the economic downturn. New factories have to be built to produce these displays, and that build-out won't happen until credit and capital free up and consumer demand returns. The Samsung rep working the AMOLED booth made clear that there's no announced timeframe for bringing these displays to market, which suggests that they're all one-off lab prototypes and not evidence of a functioning production pipeline.

And given that Samsung has been ahead of everyone else in the large-screen OLED race, I wouldn't count on Sony or anyone else being further along.