Now it's about YouTube (GOOG) and iTunes (AAPL), video and audio, movies and music, 3D living color and surround sound. How ironic that while your computer is working harder, you're not. The complexity under the hood is rising while your controls are simplifying to the computing equivalent of a key, a steering wheel, and a few pedals. You press one button, and hundreds of parallel graphics computing cores produce the effect of vastly detailed 3D worlds.

The great visual computing era is upon us, and almost everyone is at least partially aware of it. But some groups are getting more out of the new computing paradigm than others. Among the haves are consumers, who only a few years ago were typing text into this window and that dialogue box but are now increasingly selecting a big button with a one-thumb-controlled remote and launching a movie. Tada! Done. The least IT-savvy segment of computer buyers, consumers are extracting the most value from computer technology.

Another group has long understood the value of 3D computing: graphical workstation users. Indeed, the folks who design airplanes, search for oil deposits, and create new drugs have been hip to 3D for years.

In the old days, a designer working on an airplane wing handed a bunch of punch cards to the computer operator and waited a week to get back thousands of numbers on fanfold paper. Today all those complex data are represented as a picture of the airplane wing showing, in 3D color, the flows under various conditions. Viewers can rotate the image in real time. The engineer can tweak a parameter to see how it affects the entire design.

The oil and gas driller can send seismic waves miles under the sea floor, gather the echoes, and deduce whether petroleum might exist there. Used by all the major oil companies, programs like GeoProbe from Halliburton (HAL) subsidiary Landmark produce clear 3D images of rock structures under the seabed. The software does just about everything but yell "Drill there!"

Researchers can use 3D computing to run simulations of pharmaceutical compounds. The technology quickly eliminates combinations that won't work, saving scientists' time.

And 3D graphical computing has begun trickling down to more ordinary commercial applications. Small architecture shops can afford hardware and software that allow them to assess the engineering issues associated with that cantilevered addition the client is contemplating. Interior designers can take their clients on a 3D walk-through of the whole house.