If some prominent Hollywood directors and an Irish rock band have their way, moviegoers en masse will soon be heading back to the future, wearing new fangled 3-D glasses.

Two weeks ago, the next phase in the theatrical viewing experience took a significant leap forward, as Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson signed on to direct and produce for Paramount?s Dream-Works Studios a trilogy of 3-D movies about the intrepid Belgian comic-book hero Tintin.

And on May 19, nearly an hour of footage from the 3-D concert film of the Irish rock band U2 made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival.

As U2 3D demonstrates, this is definitely not the 3-D of drive-in memories.

The concert film gives the audience the palpable experience of being present, as the camera swivels around Bono's face,then soars over and down among the60,000 concert-goers.

And though the new version still requires audience members to wear glasses,they are not the old red-and-green variety,but sleek black ones.

"This is a different experience; it's much more voyeuristic," said Mr Jon Landau, the producer of Avatar, James Cameron's ambitious and expensive movie about a battle between humans and aliens, which is currently being shot in 3-D using a combination of computer animation and motion-capture technology.

"The screen has always been an emotional barrier for audiences. Good 3-D makes the screen go away. It disappears,and you're looking at a window into a world."

That view, however, isn't completely clear yet. So far, digital projection has been installed in only about 2,300 of the37,000 theatres in the United States,with 3-D projection in just 700 of those.

In Singapore, there are more than 20digital theatres .

Theatre owners in the US have been slow to upgrade to expensive digital projectors,and it is an open question whether many American moviegoers will pay an extra dollar or two for tickets to 3-D films.

The 3-D film first flourished in the early1950s, when movies like House Of Wax and Disney's Melody introduced audiences to the delights and annoyances of donning special glasses.

But because of a combination of technological complexities, eye fatigue and alack of compelling feature-length movies,many of the 3-D films were horror or soft-core pornography, which kept the film-making format on the fringes of the mainstream.

The emergence of Imax and the technological advances of the last few years,however, have piqued the interest of Hollywood's top directors.

Cameron, who made the 3-D Imax documentary Ghosts of the Abyss in2003, is using motion capture technology and computer graphics to create realistic characters and fantasy worlds for Avatar.

Twentieth Century Fox will release that film, with an estimated US$200 million(S$302 million) cost, in 2009, mainly in 3-D. (Landau said that Cameron wore 3-D glasses - the latest have plastic rims - to look at his daily footage.)

Audiences, which have had a taste of the future in 3-D versions of children'sfare like Monster House and Chicken Little,will get another early blast of the experience in Robert Zemeckis' adventure-drama Beowulf, to be released,wherever possible in 3-D, by Paramount and Warner Brothers in November.

And DreamWorks Animation SKG has announced that all of its future movies will be shot in 3-D, for release beginning in 2009.

"I believe that this is the single greatest opportunity for the movie going experience since the advent of colour," Mr Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, said in an e-mail message.

"It has been more than 60 years since there has been a significant enhance mentor innovation to the movie going experience."

He predicted that starting in 2009, "a significant percentage of the big mainstream films will be made and exhibited in this format".