3D I/O as VW enabler

For the past couple of months I have been pondering the issue of VW mainstream penetration as a 3D extension or hull of the WWW.

In the recent VW2007 in NYC, IBM rep was talking extensively about the 3Dnet - what he/they see as the future metaverse like internet.

So beyond the SF connotations what is really the key issue that might drive this development? Personally I feel that I/O devices are THE critical missing link in our 3D experience (of course things like BW, MIPS interop and so on are also not there yet). These devices were basically not even touched upon at VW and in a local gaming conference I attended, and are only lightly touched upon in the blogging community as far as I can see.

The 3D information revolution is mainly based on the premise that our brain processes 3D data faster and more efficiently than 2D as it has honed these skills over many years of evolution(very similar to the way color adds a lot to our image processing abilities such as depth perception, object recognition and so forth). That basically means that the optimal pre-processing of visual information requires that it be rendered in REAL 3D.
The problem is that the current 3D is a mere 2D projection of 3D objects and does not allow our brain to use the information in its fullest (e.g. - two eyes don't really have different perspectives, small head movements do not change the point of view and so on). I argue that when devices allowing REAL3D experience become more wide spread we will be able to harness the power of this revolution. I am talking about devices like haptic gloves and VR goggles and in the future probably brain implants.
The current state of such devices is that they are not there yet as far as price point, performance and usability (some early examples: PureDepth, Icuiti). They will undoubtedly debut in medical/military/research applications or in high end gaming platforms - but as the price/performance mix changes such offerings will become household favorites (just like WiFi, broadband, MP3's and cellphones). A recent article in SciAm featured two extreme high end devices aimed and the radiology field (read $50K a pop!) but it is not far reaching to think that at the rate we are going now we will have such CE devices gaining popular acceptability within the next ten years.

Most skeptics usually point to the fact that text comprehension and searching does not lend itself to 3D....I beg to differ!
Text is not only about reading. Most of what we do with text is search and arrange textual items within various contexts - like lookup something, schedule an appointment, edit a post and so on. To that end it is quite probably that 3D interfaces will drastically change the way we go about these tasks. just look at MSresearch demo to think about what could be next (and there are many others.
The reason that text is such is that it is the only form of information that is formally learned and not hardwired into our brain like say - recognizing faces. Thus text evolved together with the technology that we invented to make it (chisel - feather - fountain pen - ballpen - printing press -writing machine - computer - T9...).One has to wonder what type of text abstraction could be formed when 3D reading and writing is freely available....could we invent a new way to write and read that utilizes 3D?
MC