I never understood how so many influential players in the television industry got behind 3DTV. For the past two years of the International Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, 3D TV was touted as revolutionary, riding the coattails of the success of 3D technology in movie theaters. Television watchers would have a more interactive experience than ever before, they said. The potential was limitless, they said.

However, there was always one glaring hiccup in my mind, that television companies chuckled at or glanced over: the glasses. Somehow, the proponents of 3D TV thought they could dilute the headache-inducing, inconvenient, one-more-thing-to-lose drawbacks of the glasses requirement with fancy technological terms that the average consumer doesn’t understand. Talk to anyone leaving a 3D movie- people understand the inconvenience of the glasses.

I’ll share an example of a potentially hazardous situation as a result of the glasses, involving the most frequent watcher of TV I know: my friend’s mother, Barbara.

Barbara loves to watch TV while she cooks. She has positioned TVs throughout her house such that at any point a screen is always visible- down any hall, from any stair and of course, in the kitchen. I swear she has like ten shows going at a time. While she watches, her hands toil away in a blur, mincing and chopping and whisking. Every so often, she spares a fleeting glance to the cutting board form the television, I assume to make sure her fingertips are still attached. Assuming Barbara could keep track of her 3D glasses — unlike the remote, her car keys or her purse — I shudder to think of what would happen when that fleeting glance is spared through disorienting, multicolored lenses. There go her fingertips, into the salad bowl.

Many television and technology critics have generally accepted the death of the technology, at least in the home. Vlad Savov, from Verge wrote of CES 2013, “The show floor space dedicated to three-dimensional imagery (in 2012) has been decimated, relegating a dubious technology to its proper position as a sideshow rather than a leading cause to upgrade your TV.”

So now that 3D TV is dead, what is the future of TV? For now, it is smart TVs, super-thin displays and the successor of 3D: 4K resolution. Techies love resolution. Being an Apple fan, I can’t wait for the Apple iTV, with speculative releases dates ranging from 2013-2014.