If you thought seeing Amare Stoudemire jump naked into a pool or Diana Taurasi pose nude was visually arresting, you’ll love December 17. That’s when ESPN presents the Miami Heat against the New York Knicks live from Madison Square Garden in stunning 3-D. It will be the first of 14 games shown on ESPN’s 3-D network. The rest of the regular season slate, seven in all, will feature tilts in Phoenix, Denver, Orlando, Miami, and Atlanta.
Is anyone going to watch this cool new thing? Well, perhaps. ESPN 3-D is available to 45 million households, but only 500,000 3-D television sets have been shipped. Still, it sounds like a pretty cool experiment.
“There are things that you can see in 3-D that you can’t see in 2-D, and that mostly revolves around low-angle cameras that let you appreciate how fast the players are,” Steve Hellmuth, the N.B.A.’s executive vice president for operations and technology, told The New York Times. “You have to stay low, and the ref might run in front of you.”