Sitting on your living room couch, you can experience the wonders of sports on 3D TV: a football flies through the goal posts and smack dab into your face, an image so real you flinch and move out of the way. The NBA and a few of its member organizations began flirting with 3D technology back in 2007.

ESPN is to launch a 3D channel in June 2010, aiming to broadcast 85 live events, including the World Cup and BCS national championship game. Fox is also working with DIRECTV to produce its 2010 MLB All-Star game in 3D. Discovery is also going to launch a 3D network in 2011.

"It's going to be an evolution, not a revolution, but it's going to be changing the way we look at television in the household," said Chuck Pagano, ESPN vice president of technology. "We don't know what the appetite is yet, but we are going to learn a lot in this next year."

There are certain hurdles to 3D sports production like getting the graphics right—and deciding where to put the box score and statistics is as important as creating the graphics themselves. Because the broadcast has depth, graphics had to be placed in a way that wouldn't lead to players constantly running through them and distracting from the game. 3ality doesn't put the graphics far in front of everything because they found most people didn't mind if players occasionally blocked them.

Television manufacturers see an opportunity to grow their market and are beginning to sell 3D TVs in the United States. Hollywood released about 14 3D movies last year, none bigger than blockbuster Avatar, which surpassed Titanic as the highest worldwide grossing film of all-time with $2.5 billion in sales.

Besides movies that come from cinemas to home TV, more content for TV is going to have to be produced to make it worth the investment for the consumer to buy a 3D TV set.

There is another issue to watching 3D at home - those glasses, another requirement to watch in 3D. High-tech glasses are sold separately and range in price from $35 to $300.

Not all consumers are prepared to put on glasses at home to watch TV programs.