Hence, Sony’s announcement that it’s making a big bet on…3-D TVs. CEO Howard Stringer is using the IFA Technology Show in Berlin to announce that Sony will make 3-D Bravia sets.

And 3-D Vaio laptops. And 3-D PlayStation3s. And 3-D Blu-ray DVD players.

No plans for a 3-D Walkman, though. (But wait!)

This is a recurring theme for Sony, by the way: Stringer also talked up 3-D in January at the Consumer Electronics Show. I still wonder about the actual demand for this; I sampled some new-fangled 3-D at CES and left underwhelmed. But the stuff I saw–a live broadcast of the college football championship game–was, admittedly, an experiment.

In any case, even if you believe Stringer’s assertion that consumers really love the new 3-D experience, there are some big hurdles before Sony (SNE) or anyone else in home electronics can capitalize on it. For instance:

• A looming format war, the same thing that kept Blu-ray from taking a running start at the DVD market.
• Ginormous prices: Sony hasn’t said how much its 3-D-enabled TV sets will cost, but the ones that rival LG go for something like $5,500.

At Sony’s keynote presentation yesterday, CEO Howard Stringer devoted a good chunk of his presentation to the wonders of the technology and showed off a 3-D short from Disney’s (DIS) Pixar. And last night a few hundred of us got another demo–a broadcast of the Florida/Oklahoma BCS championship game, on a giant screen, live, in 3-D.

This sounded great in theory. A brace of companies, including Cinedigm, 3ality, Carmike Cinemas (CKEC), News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and Sony (SNE), partnered up to create a special 3-D broadcast that went out to a handful of movie theaters across the U.S. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and this Web site.) And they’d like to replicate this a dozen times a year for other special occasions: Other big sports events, concerts and the like.

This stuff is still a bit rough around the edges. The 3-D cameras seem to have a hard time keeping up with high-speed action like a pass, some images didn’t seem to focus that well, and the broadcast, which was created separately from the show everyone else in the country saw, seemed to be several cameras short–not enough overhead shots of the action, etc. But that’s OK: CES is usually stuffed with vaporware that never makes it to market, so we’re willing to cut an actual product some slack.

The bigger question is whether the 3-D experience will be amazing enough to convince people to pay money to watch a big game at a theater instead of their living rooms or at a sports bar. I’m not convinced, but I’m willing to give it another shot.

Here’s some video footage from the event; I can’t show you what the broadcast looked like because my not-so trusty Flip Mino doesn’t have any kind of flash. And there’s not much point in watching a clip of a 3-D broadcast in 2-D anyway, right? Instead, I chatted with Cinedigm CEO Bud Mayo, recent Carmike investor Mark Cuban (more from him later), and Nate Westheimer, a New York-based tech guy around town who filled in as my volunteer cameraman and one-man focus group.

[Image Credit: Life/Google]

Introduced by an entertainingly giddy and sardonic Tom Hanks, who happens to star in a new Sony (SNE) movie (“Angels and Demons,” a prequel to “The Da Vinci Code”), but still made fun of his employer (“They write the lies, but I tell the truth”), Stringer showed up to show off cool stuff.

Highlights included a superthin and flexible OLED screen, a Chumby-like Internet-connected TV screen, and a series of 3-D clips. (We’ll be seeing a lot of 3-D this week).

We also got appearances from dueling animation kingpins. Disney (DIS) animation guru John Lasseter showed up to sing the praises of Blu-ray and show off a clip of “Up,” the next Pixar movie. And so did Dreamworks Animation’s (DWA) Jeffrey Katzenberg, who came to talk up the possibilities of 3-D (See? Told you. More to come.) and show off a clip of “Monsters vs. Aliens.”

The oddest Sony product: Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Oprah Winfrey-endorsed doctor who is about to have his own Sony-produced TV show. He offered health tips and measured Stringer’s waist–40 inches, or 39 if Stringer really sucked in his gut.

But to his credit, Stringer didn’t promise a cure-all for the consumer electronic industry ills: “I wish I could tell you that I’m recession-proof.”

(By the way, the image here is from Stringer’s 2008 appearance at The D Conference, but from what I can see, he’s dropped a few pounds since then. I’ll update with something more current if possible.)