It wasn't exactly Meet the Robinsons, from a storyline point of view. And the effects lagged some way behind Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3D. Given the result, the strongest cinematic echoes for England supporters were probably of House of Wax, the prototype stereoscopic Fifties horror spectacle starring Vincent Price. Taking all that into account, though, the first live-by-satellite 3D sports broadcast - of Scotland versus England from Murrayfield on Saturday afternoon - was a small but significant critical triumph in the history of moving pictures with rugby players in them.

I have seen the future of big-event sports broadcasting and it wears funny plastic glasses and sits in the dark with its mouth wide open. BBC Resources, in collaboration with The 3D Firm, a consortium of 3D image specialists, chose last weekend to trial a televisual experience intended to be several notches more immersive than you might get at home over a mug of tea and a hazelnut Boaster.

Two high-definition signals from Murrayfield, shot with twin-lensed cameras, were cunningly uplinked, downcoded and projected on to a screen at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, West London. There, our hosts had put in place the technical resources essential to the three-dimensional rugby-watching experience - beefburgers and a limitless supply of lager in plastic cups. Oh, and those 3D glasses, of course, making the audience look as though it had gathered to witness a nuclear testing.

With luck, this technology would bring us the sights, the sounds, the smells of international rugby. Inevitably, expectation was high. You imagined Jonny Wilkinson tossing away his ball tee in Edinburgh and a forest of hands in Hammersmith reaching to catch it. You imagined Simon Shaw looming out of the screen and an entire audience recoiling as one in reflexive horror - but in a good way.

These are early days, though, and it wasn't quite like that. For one thing, ours was not the expertly cut, multi-angled feed seen at home on the television. We had no close-ups, no replays and no on-screen graphics. Instead, with the Radio 5 Live commentary for company, we saw the game unfold from a slowly panning, entirely unobstructed vantage point on the halfway line - as if you were there, in other words, but also as if you had smuggled yourself into the Royal Box.

Occasionally a second camera showed the crowd in the corner of the ground, where the temptation to reach out and remove the tam-o'-shanter of the virtual spectator in front of you was palpable. Meanwhile, at penalty kicks, a third camera, at ground level behind the tryline, briefly offered the defending players in all their terrifying rotundity. Darts in 3D, one reflected, would be a cinematic experience one would travel a long way to have.

Once your eyes adjusted, the effect was pretty involving. True, the national anthems, pushed at rock'n'roll volume through the studio's sound system, were not enough to pull the Hammersmith crowd to its feet. And later on, one noticed, nobody felt any compunction to join in with the Murrayfield Mexican Wave. But perhaps that's what you get with an invited audience rather than a paying one - and when the audience is predominantly English and England contrive to play like a bunch of jittery schoolboys and lose 15-9.

Either way, the broadcast handed you an eerily convincing simulation of being placed within the bowl of the stadium. You could see how it might provide an attractive alternative to old-fashioned, two-dimensional public screenings, if offered in a local cinema. (An affordable version of the technology for home use may, sadly, be some way off. We'll just have to content ourselves with buying a plasma screen and sitting up really close.) Some rugby followers will probably argue that they can achieve a similar ocular effect, much more cheaply, during a big-screen showing at their local Frog & Firkin, provided they drink enough. But in that case the technology remains unreliable and you feel infinitely worse afterwards.

It is also true that, had this been Disney World in Florida, our seats would have trembled every time the scrum engaged. When Rory Lamont was concussed in a collision with Iain Balshaw's knees, someone would have thumped us on the side of the head with a spongy mallet. When the swirling rain blew in (a startlingly pleasant visual treat in 3D, as was the rainbow that later put in a poetic appearance over the far stand), hidden hands would have activated the sprinklers. Eighty minutes later, we would have emerged on to the street, blitzed, damp, perhaps even slightly bloodied, but, above all, knowing that we had been in a game.

But then we are still, clearly, some way short of the full wonder that will be Sensurround rugby. Even after this early experiment, a 3D future looks plausible. Plus I would hazard that it was easier to park around Hammersmith on Saturday than it was around Murrayfield, so there's at least that much to be said for it.