Philips to launch 3D television, this time with no dodgy glasses required

Forget the dodgy cardboard glasses with red and green lenses and the laughably unconvincing three-dimensional Jaws, today's 3D television is more like something out of Ridley Scott's Bladerunner.

Using a "lenticular" lens similar to the grooved plastic pictures that move when flexed, Philips 3DTV – which will be launched in London today – sends different signals to each eye to trick your brain into seeing images floating in front of the screen.

With a price tag somewhere in the region of £6000, and almost no content save some pilot advertising, the UK public's evening viewing is not likely to be transformed immediately. But Philips has a timescale of four to five years before the sets are commonplace and the bulk of TV advertising leaps out of the screen. The company already has software that can "render" existing 2D content into either 2Dplus or 3D or a mixture of both.

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In the short term, there is plenty to attract the commercial market. At today's launch, potential advertisers will be given a demonstration of not only the single 42-inch screen and its eerily convincing illusion of depth, but also of the massive nine-screen "Wowzone". Public spaces from shopping centres to airports, ultimately even the lights of Times Square or Piccadilly Circus, could be transformed into a futuristic world of either ads or announcements that are that much harder to ignore.

Two motor manufacturers are already in talks with the Picture Production Company, a content group, about putting the screen in all their show rooms, and computer games companies are also showing considerable interest.

The lure of taking the action right to the viewer is not new – in 1956 the Queen's coronation was filmed in 3D – and although the lenticular system cannot scale up to a cinema screen, better polarised glasses have put the possibility back on the film industry's agenda.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, from DreamWorks Animation, has described 3D as "the greatest innovation in film since colour" – cinemas on both sides of the Atlantic have been investing and Hollywood has some 30 3D movies in the pipeline, including productions from Tim Burton and James Cameron.