The applications for a 3-D wearable "environment"--basically home IMax--are so numerous that I wish to hell I had some way to get in on the ground floor of this.

Back in the very early days of my space development experience, one of a number of exotic selling points was "telepresence" on the Moon (the only major body close enough to have it work properly). The idea was to have a camera slaved to a helmet, so it looked like you were actually there. If you had a rover hooked up, even better. Some people are still working on this, but not me.

The Earth-bound applications were obvious, too. A camera at a coral reef, or at the Grand Canyon, or Mount Everest. This was long before "webcams" or even commercial solid-state cameras. I came up with the idea of somehow having a "fisheye" TV camera that would take in an entire circle of view, and somehow getting computers to deliver a properly morphed certain sector of that view to many different headsets from one unmoving camera assembly. Beyond that, from a technical and computing standpoint, I was stuck.

Nowadays with high-res CCDs, flat displays, and computing power up the wazoo, it's just a matter of time. Webcams cover some of this, but most of the ones I've seen are low-res with minimal frames per second.

This works even without headsets. Someday when most people have big, high-res flat-panel sets, how much would they pay for a channel that overlooks a gorgeous view in real time, or that coral reef?