The graphics industry is on the verge of a powerful transformation that will bring three-dimensional video displays and screens to computers and other computing devices.

"We are on the cusp of a display revolution," Nvidia Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang said Monday at a San Jose industry trade show. The industry used to be all about color, he said. "Now it's about more dimensionalization."

Speaking at the Nvision 2008 show, Huang said the revolution will be enabled by increasingly powerful graphics chips that now put more than 100 processors on a single slice of silicon and harness a teraflop of computing capacity. A teraflop is a measure of computing speed equal to a trillion calculations a second.

"We transformed industry after industry," he said, referring to graphics chip manufacturers. Automobiles are now designed digitally, movie makers use use digital effects, and video games get more realistic each year.

Next on the list are the medical industry, where researchers need powerful computers to show images of disease in real time, and the computing industry itself, where virtual worlds hold the promise of enhancing human interaction.

During a keynote presentation, Huang highlighted the Korean company Nurien, where visitors design avatars that move realistically and create rooms with furniture and television screens. "It's going to be the virtual Facebook," he said.

Another technology to benefit from dimensions is Microsoft's Photosynth, where photos can be digitally fitted together into three-dimensional panoramas.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.