Halftime Spectacles

Not even halftime will provide a respite this year from Super Bowl hype. The mid-game spectacle -- featuring fireworks, 100 motorcycles and the world's largest card trick -- will be telecast, for the first time ever, in 3-D. Two commercials for diet Coke, one starring British singer George Michael, will also pop out at viewers in 3-D. A similar gimmick was tried early this month on three Fox stations during the Rose Parade, but this marks its network-TV debut.

Through retailers, Coca-Cola is distributing 20 million pairs of cardboard glasses for the event. But unspectacled viewers will not see a blurry image, as they did with the '50s technology, used in movies like House of Wax. A new process, Nuoptix 3D, uses regular cameras and delivers a normal picture. The illusion of depth is created by different-color lenses in the glasses, which transmit the image 16 milliseconds slower to the right eye than to the left. One catch: to get the 3-D effect, there has to be constant motion on the screen. So even if the game slows to a crawl, the halftime action will be fast and furious.