3D: The Next Big Thing?

The annual Tech Retreat of the Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA) is where many new technologies get introduced. Sony reportedly “introduced” its F65 camera and SR-memory technologies at this year’s exhibition of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) in Las Vegas in April; more than a year earlier, both were described for HPA Tech Retreat attendees. Panasonic’s Varicam and Sony’s HDCAM SR are just two of the other technologies that were introduced at previous HPA Tech Retreats.

Stereoscopic 3D (S3D) is no exception. The 2011 retreat, last February, saw the introduction of the SRI stereoscopic test pattern (below) and a SoliDDD multiview autostereoscopic display, among many other demos, and a presentation from Germany’s RheinMain University of Applied Sciences showed actual measured crosstalk (ghosting) for many commercial S3D systems, with names named. The 2012 retreat coming up in February is expected to feature an S3D lens adapter for use in almost any PL-mount system and binocular-vision Royal Society Research Fellow Jenny Read, who has degrees in astrophysics, neuroscience, and psychology.

So, is S3D the next big thing in home entertainment? Here’s what appeared in The New York Times: “…this week, a special study group of experts on stereoscopic television is meeting in Washington to try to decide which system should be adopted. Should the group reach agreement, the system it endorses would be proposed to the International Telecommunications Union, which is considering adopting a global standard for 3-D television.”

Yes, that appeared in The New York Times, in an article headlined “3-D TV Thrives Outside the U.S.”

It appeared on April 22.

It appeared on April 22 of the year 1980, more than 30 years ago. And, roughly 30 years before that, on May 3, 1953, Business Week ran the headline “3-D Invades TV,” describing ongoing S3D broadcasts that began that year.

One might think those broadcasts were simply of movies that used color filters (anaglyph) to separate the left- and right-eye views. They weren’t. Color TV was almost nonexistent at the time. Instead, the S3D TV broadcasts that began in 1953 used side-by-side images with a polarizing screen placed over the picture-tube faceplate and prismatic polarized glasses (right) for viewing. And even those weren’t the first S3D television broadcasts.

The 1930 book Fundamentals of Television, by Thomas Benson, begins its section on S3D with the following sentence. “There are, of course, several possible methods of accomplishing stereoscopic television.” The author could be so definitive not only because John Logie Baird had already broadcast S3D television in 1928 (the receiver, with stereoscope viewing device, is shown at left) but also because of the many patents that covered it, such Georges Valensi’s number 577,762 in France in 1922.

If S3D television was first broadcast more than 80 years ago (and was discussed even earlier), why should it be considered the next big thing now? There are some good reasons.

Tiny image sensors now allow side-by-side stereoscopic video acquisition (and that lens adapter at the upcoming HPA Tech Retreat could expand that capability to even more cameras). Digital correction processing now allows differences between image pairs to be changed in production or post.  There are now systems for automatic stereoscopic alignment.  And entropy-based bit-rate-reduction (digital compression) systems now allow two eye views to be recorded or transmitted in much less than twice the rate of a single view.

Then there are display systems. Most modern S3D cinemas use a system involving circularly polarized viewing glasses, with an optical “plate” in front of the projector to switch polarization as appropriate between the alternating left-eye and right-eye views. The system is being suggested for home TVs, too.

Above is a figure from a U.S. patent that covers the polarization-rotation plate system for such S3D viewing. The patent is number 4,541,691, issued to Thomas S. Buzak of Beaverton, Oregon. Some might recognize that location as the headquarters of the test-&-measurement company Tektronix, and, indeed the patent was assigned to them. It was applied for in 1983 and issued in 1985, at a time when Tektronix was in the video-image display business, largely using picture tubes, as can be seen at the left side of another figure (below) from the patent. Tektronix described and demonstrated the system with both direct-view (home TV-type) and projected (cinema-type) displays starting in 1984.

Perhaps the most-advanced form of S3D eyewear is individual goggles with built-in picture displays. They’re not exactly a new idea, either, as this portion of an image (left) from the March 1949 issue of Radio-Electronics magazine shows. The diagonal lines are “rabbit-ears” antennas. In this case, idea is an appropriate description.

Some say any form of glasses is the bane of S3D, especially in homes. They prefer some form of autostereoscopic display, an S3D display that can be viewed without glasses (or other intervention between viewer and screen).

There have been some major developments in this technology recently. If you’ve seen Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol, you saw a theoretical eye-tracking autostereoscopic display screen intended to fool a guard. The illusion, unfortunately, gets destroyed when more guards show up, and the system can’t figure out whose eyes to track, causing shifting images.

If, however, you had attended Ian Sexton’s presentation on advanced autostereoscopic displays in the panel “Tomorrow’s 3D: A Glimpse from Today” at 3D World in New York in October, you’d have seen that tracking the eyes of multiple viewers is not really a problem. The prototypical light engine of the European HELIUM3D (High-Efficiency Laser-based multI-User Multu-modal 3D Display) project he described is shown above right.

Of course, HELIUM3D was by no means the first multi-viewer autostereoscopic display. At left (click for a larger view) is the parallax-barrier grid being applied to the screen of a cinema in Moscow prior to its showing of a glasses-free 3D movie, Concert, in February 1941 (right). Glasses-free “Stereo Kino” auditoriums later opened in other cities in and influenced by the Soviet Union.

All S3D viewing-control mechanisms (the ones used to ensure that the appropriate view goes to the correct eye) have historic origins. In the photo of the 1928 S3D TV receiver above, the viewing-control mechanism can be seen to be a Holmes-type prismatic-lensed stereoscope, dating to the mid-19th century. The use of the word anaglyph to describe colored glasses dates to a French S3D-movie system in 1893. Projection of S3D images onto a metallic screen so as to allow the use of polarized glasses dates back at least to 1891.

Perhaps the most popular current form of home S3D TV uses shutter glasses that allow the eyes to see the screen alternately as the different views are displayed. Such shutters require synchronization to the display, usually accomplished through infra-red signaling. Are they, at least, a recent innovation?

The Teleview system (above) premiered at a New York cinema in 1922 (showing an S3D science-fiction movie with special effects). As can be seen from the illustration, each audience member had an individual viewing device. The device was a rapid, synchronized, view-alternating shutter, as shown at left (click on the image for a larger view). But even that wasn’t the earliest active-shutter 3D-viewing system. The recent SMPTE book 3D Cinema and Television Technology: The First 100 Years, edited by Michael D. Smith, Peter Lude, and Bill Hogan, with introductions by Ray Zone, begins with a 1919 paper by the Society’s founder indicating that shutter-based viewing systems were already well known by that date.

Indeed they were! Above is a portion of a drawing from British patent 711, issued March 23, 1853 to Antoine Claudet. The mechanism at the top right shuttled the sliding shutter bar at the top left back and forth so that a viewer looking into the eyepieces shown at the bottom would see the appropriate view in the appropriate eye.

That was probably the earliest form of S3D shuttering, but it wasn’t the earliest S3D photographic motion-picture patent. The latter (but earlier) achievement belongs to Jules Duboscq, an instrument maker who was head of special effects at the Paris Opera. He got that post by creating an electric-light sunrise effect there in 1849, thirty years before Edison’s light-bulb demonstration. To achieve the effect, he had to create not only the illumination system but also a power source for it. Nature magazine later praised his development of a means of precipitating the toxic fumes from the batteries used, so as not to poison the patrons of the opera.

On November 12, 1852, in an addendum to his French patent 13,069, he described a “stéréofantascope” or “bioscope,” an S3D movie system. Coincidentally, the patent addendum describes the first photographic movie system, years before even Eadweard Muybridge’s work.

There is a surviving Duboscq Bioscope S3D motion-picture disc (shown at left, click to enlarge) at the Museum of the History of Science at the University of Ghent, Belgium. It has 12 stereo pairs of sequential albumen photographic prints of a steam engine.

Given that we are rapidly approaching the 160th anniversary of S3D moving-image viewing, it might be hard to think of S3D as the next big thing. On the other hand, tomorrow is another year.

Tags: 3d, 3d glasses, 3D World, 3dtv, anaglyph, Antoine Claudet, bioscope, Eadweard Muybridge, eye-tracking, Ghost Protocol, HELIUM3D, HPA Tech Retreat, Ian Sexton, Jenny Read, John Logie Baird, Jules Duboscq, Paris Opera, S3D, Stereo Kino, stereofantascope, Tektronix, Teleview

Y4K?

 

What should come after HDTV? There’s certainly a lot of buzz about 3D TV. Such directors as James Cameron and Douglas Trumbull are pushing for higher frame rates. Several manufacturers have introduced TVs with a 21:9 (“CinemaScope”) aspect ratio instead of HDTV’s 16:9. Some think we should increase dynamic range (the range from dark to light). Some think it should be a greater range of colors. Japan’s Super Hi-Vision offers 22.2-channel surround sound. And then there’s 4K.

In simple terms, 4K has approximately twice as much detail as HDTV in both the horizontal and vertical directions. If the orange rectangle above is HDTV, the blue one is roughly 4K. It’s called 4K because there are 4096 picture elements (pixels) per line.

This post will not get much more involved with what 4K is. The definition of 4096 pixels per line says nothing about capture or display.  Even at lower resolutions, some cameras use a complete image sensor for each primary color; others use some sort of color filtering on a single image sensor. At left is Colin Burnett’s depiction of the popular Bayer filter design. Clearly, if such a filtered image sensor were shooting another Bayer filter offset by one color element, the result would be nothing like the original.

Optical filtering and “demosaicking” algorithms can reduce color problems, but the filtering also reduces resolution. Some say a single color-filtered image sensor with 4096 pixels per line is 4K; others say it isn’t. That’s an argument for a different post.  This one is about why 4K might be considered useful.

An obvious answer is for more detail resolution. But maybe that’s not quite as obvious as it seems at first glance. The history of video technology certainly shows ever-increasing resolutions, from eight scanning lines per frame in the 1920s to HDTV’s….

As can be seen above, in 1935, a British Parliamentary Report declared that HDTV should have no fewer than 240 lines per frame. Today’s HDTV has 720 or 1080 “active” (picture-carrying) lines per frame, and 4K has a nominal 2160, but even ordinary 525-line (~480 active) TV was considered HDTV when it was first introduced.

Human visual acuity is often measured with a common Snellen eye chart, as shown at left above. On the line for “normal” vision (20/20 in the U.S., 6/6 in other parts of the world), each portion of the “optotype” character occupies one arcminute (1′, a sixtieth of a degree) of retinal angle, so there are 30 “cycles” of black and white lines per degree.

Bernard Lechner, a researcher at RCA Laboratories at the time, studied television viewing distances in the U.S. and determined they were about nine feet (Richard Jackson, a researcher at Philips Laboratories in the UK at the same time, came up with a similar three meters). As shown above, a 25-inch 4:3 TV screen provides just about a perfect match to “normal” vision’s 30 cycles per degree when “525-line” television is viewed at the Lechner Distance — roughly seven times the picture height.

HDTV should, under the same theory, be viewed from a smaller multiple of the screen height (h). For 1080 active lines, it should be 7.15 x 480/1080, or about 3.2h. Looked at another way, at a nine-foot viewing distance, the height should be about 34 inches, a diagonal screen size of about 60 inches, and, indeed, 60-inch (and larger) HDTV screens are not uncommon (and so are closer viewing distances).

For 4K (again, using the same theory), it should be a screen height of about 68 inches. Add a few inches for a screen bezel and stand, and mount it on a table, and suddenly the viewer needs a minimum ceiling height of nine feet!

Of course, cinema auditoriums don’t have domestic ceiling heights. Above is an elevation of a typical old-style auditorium, courtesy of Warner Bros. Technical Operations. The scale is in picture heights. Back near the projection booth, standard-definition resolution seems adequate. Even in the fifth row, HD resolution seems adequate. Below, however, is a modern, stadium-seating cinema auditorium (courtesy of the same source).

This time, even a viewer with “normal” vision in the last row could see greater-than-HD detail, and 4K could well serve most of the auditorium. That’s one reason why there’s interest in 4K for cinema distribution.

Another is questions about that theory of “normal” vision. First of all, there are lines on the Snellen eye chart (which dates back to 1862) below the “normal” line, meaning some viewers can see more resolution.

Then there are the sharp lines of the optotypes. A wave cycle would have gently shaded transitions between white and black, which might make the optotype more difficult to identify on an eye chart. Adding in higher frequencies, as shown below, makes the edges sharper, and 4K offers higher frequencies than does HD.

Then there’s sharpness, which is different from resolution. Words that end in -ness (brightness, loudness, sharpness, etc.) tend to be human psychophysical sensations (psychological responses to physical stimuli) rather than simple machine-measurable characteristics (luminance, sound level, resolution, contrast, etc.). Another RCA Labs researcher, Otto Schade, showed that sharpness is proportional to the square of the area under a modulation-transfer function (MTF) curve, a curve plotting contrast ratio against resolution.

One of the factors affecting an MTF curve is the filtering inherent in sampling, as is done in imaging. An ideal filter might use a sine of x divided by x function, also called a SINC function. Above is a SINC function for an arbitrary image sensor and its filters. It might be called a 2K sensor, but the contrast ratio at 2K is zero, as shown by the red arrow at the left.

Above is the same SINC function. All that has changed is a doubling of the number of pixels (in each direction). Now the contrast ratio at 2K is 64%, a dramatic increase (again, as shown by the red arrow at the left). Of course, if the original sensor offered 64% at 2K, the improvement offered by 4K would be much less dramatic, a reason why the question of what 4K is is not trivial.

Then there’s 3D.  Some of the issues associated with 3D shooting relate to the use of two cameras with different image sensors and processing. One camera might deliver different gray scale, color, or even geometry from the other.

Above is an alternative, two HD images (one for each eye’s view) on a single 4K image sensor. A Zepar stereoscopic lens system on a Vision Research Phantom 65 camera serves that purpose. It’s even available for rent.

There are other reasons one might want to shoot HD-sized images on a 4K sensor. One is image stabilization. The solid orange rectangle above represents an HD image that has been jiggled out of its appropriate position, the lighter orange rectangle behind it with the dotted border. There are many image-stabilization systems available that can straighten out a subject in the center, but they do so by trimming away what doesn’t fit, resulting in the smaller, green rectangle. If a 4K sensor is used, however, the complete image can be stabilized.

It’s not just stabilization. An HD-sized image shot on a 4K sensor can be reframed in post production. The image can be moved left or right, up or down, rotated, or even zoomed out.

So 4K offers much even to people not intending to display 4K. But it comes at a cost. Cameras and displays for 4K are more expensive, and an uncompressed 4K signal has more than four times as much data as HD. If the 1080p60 (1080 active lines, progressively scanned, at roughly 60 frames per second) version of HD uses 3G (three-gigabit-per-second) connections, 4K might require four of those.

When getting 4K to cinemas or homes, however, compression is likely to be used, and, as can be seen by the MTF curves, the highest-resolution portion of the image has the least contrast ratio. It has been suggested that, in real-world images, it might take as little as an extra 5% of data rate to encode the extra detail of 4K over HD.

So, is 4K the future? The aforementioned Super Hi-Vision is already effectively 8K, and it’s scheduled to be used in next year’s Olympic Games.

Tags: 3d, 3dtv, 4K, Bayer filter, Douglas Trumbull, James Cameron, mtf, optotype, Otto Schade, Phantom 65, Selsdon Committee, sharpness, SINC, Snellen, Super Hi-Vision, viewing distance, Zepar

The Best 3D Conference

Do you think you know something about stereoscopic 3D? Test yourself with the six basic journalistic questions: who, what, when, where, how, and why.

Who wrote the first article on holographic television to appear in the SMPTE Journal? What is cyclovergence? When is a seven-second stereo delay appropriate? Where can lens centering be corrected instantly in any stereoscopic camera rig without digital processing? How does viewing distance affect scene depth? And why doesn’t pseudostereo destroy depth perception?

All of those questions, and many more, were answered last month at the Society of Motion-Picture and Television Engineers’ (SMPTE’s) 2nd-annual International Conference on Stereoscopic 3D for Media & Entertainment, held in New York’s Hudson Theater (left, photo by Ken Carroza). From my point of view, it was the best stereoscopic-3D event that has ever taken place anywhere.

Full disclosure: As a member of the trade press, I was admitted free (and got some free food). The same is true at most conferences I attend. And the complimentary entry and food has never stopped me from panning events I didn’t like. This one I loved!

The thrills started with the very first presentation, “Getting the Geometry Right,” by Jenny Read, a research fellow at the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University. Read’s Oxford doctorate was in theoretical astrophysics before she moved into visual neuroscience, spending four years at the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

I’ve provided that snippet of her biographical info here as a small taste of the caliber of the presenters at the conference. There were many other vision scientists, but other presenters were associated with movie studios, manufacturers, shooters, and service providers. And the audience gamut also ran from engineering executives at television networks and movie studios to New York public-access-cable legend Ugly George (right; click picture to expand).

Back to Dr. Read’s presentation, I cannot confirm that everyone in the audience did the same, but, as far as I could see, attendees were taking notes frantically almost as soon as she started speaking. Consider, for example, cyclovergence. Everyone knows our eyes can pivot up & down (around the x-axis) and left & right (around the y-axis), but did you know they can also rotate clockwise & counterclockwise (around the z-axis)? That’s cyclovergence, and it’s actually common.

The main topic of Read’s presentation was vertical disparities between the two eye views. Those caused by camera or lens misalignments are typically processed out, but ordinary vision includes vertical disparities introduced by eye pointing.

At right is an illustration from Peter Wilson and Kommer Kleijn’s presentation last year at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC), “Stereoscopic Capture for 2D Practitioners.” If our eyes converge on something, the theoretical rectangular plane of convergence becomes two trapezoids with vertical disparities. So vertical disparities are not necessarily problematic for human vision.

Read showed other ways vertical disparities can get introduced. At left is what two eyes would see if looking towards the right (as might be the case when sitting to the left of a stereoscopic display screen). Then she explained how our brains convert vertical disparity information into depth information, so an oblique screen view can change the appearance of people into something seeming like living cut-out puppets.

That was clearly not the only mechanism for changing apparent depth. Below is a graph from “Effect of Scene, Camera, and Viewing Parameters on the Perception of 3D Imagery,” presented by Brad Collar of Warner Bros. and Michael D. Smith. They showed depth in a scene, what it looks like when seen on a cinema-sized screen, and what it looks like on other screens, such as those used for home viewing. The depth collapsed from its cinema look to its home look, effectively going from normal character roundness to the appearance of cardboard cut outs. But the graph below shows what happened after processing to restore the depth. The roundness came back, but everything was pushed behind the screen (the red vertical line).

Some viewers have complained about miniaturization in 3D TV, such as burly football players looking like little dolls. But our visual systems can perform amazing feats of depth correction.

In a presentation titled “Depth Cue Interactions in Stereoscopic 3D Media,” Robert Allison of York University noted a few of the cues viewers use for depth perception, including occlusion and perspective. Then he showed a real-world 3D scene. It appeared to be in 3D, and it offered a stereoscopic sensation, though something seemed to be wrong. In fact, it was intentionally pseudostereoscopic, with left- and right-eye views reversed. But the non-stereoscopic depth cues kept the apparent depth correct. Later he showed how even just contrasty lighting can increase apparent depth sensation.

Of course, lost roundness (and associated miniaturization) aren’t the only perceptual issues associated with stereoscopic 3D. In “Focusing and Fixating on Stereoscopic Images: What We Know and Need to Know,” Simon Watt of Bangor University showed some of the latest information on viewer discomfort caused by a conflict between vergence (the distance derived from where the eyes point) and accommodation (the distance derived from what the eyes are focused on, which is the screen).

The chart at right is based on some of the latest work from the Visual Space Perception Laboratory at the University of California – Berkeley. It shows that the approximate comfort zone is based, as might be expected, only on viewing distance. In a cinema, viewers should be comfortable with depth going away from them to infinity and coming out of the screen almost to hit them on their faces. At a TV-viewing distance, even far depth can be uncomfortable. At a computer-viewing distance, the comfort range is smaller still.

Viewing distances for handheld devices should result in even narrower comfort zones, but that’s only if they’re stereoscopic.  There are other options that were discussed at the SMPTE conference. Ichiro Kawakami of Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) described a glasses-free 200-projector-based autostereoscopic display. Douglas Lanman of the MIT Media Lab actually brought a demonstration of a layered light-field system that attendees could hold. As shown below (click for a larger view, more info here: http://www.layered3d.info), they have come up with a mechanism for reproducing the original light field.

On the same day that The New York Times reported on a camera that allows focus to be controlled after a picture is taken (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/technology/22camera.html), Professor Marc Levoy of Stanford University explained to attendees at the SMPTE conference how it’s done and the application of “computational cinematography” to 3D. And then there’s holography.

Mark Lucente of Zebra Imaging gave a presentation titled “The First 20 Years of Holographic Video — and the Next 20.” But he was sort of contradicted (at least in terms of the earliest date) by the next presentation, from V. Michael Bove of MIT, titled “Live Holographic TV: from Misconceptions to Engineering.”

In 1962, Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks of the University of Michigan created what is generally considered the first 3D hologram. In 1965, they published a paper (left) in the SMPTE Journal about what would be required for holographic 3D TV (Lucente was referring to actual, not theoretical displays; see his comment below).

Perhaps live entertainment holography is still not quite around the corner. That’s okay. The SMPTE conference offered plenty of practical information that can be used today.

Consider “New Techniques to Compensate Mistracking within Stereoscopic Acquisition Systems,” by Canon’s Larry Thorpe. Dual-camera rigs can be adjusted so that optical centers are exactly where they should be, which is not necessarily where the camera bodies would suggest. There are tolerances in lens mounts on both the lens and camera portions that can add up to significant errors. And once zooming is added, all bets are off.

Two groups of lens elements move to effect the magnification change and focus compensation, and a third group moves to adjust focus. It’s a mess! But lens manufacturers have introduced optical image stabilization systems, one version of which is shown at right. With the appropriate controls, those stabilizing elements can be used to keep the images stereoscopically centered throughout the zoom and focus ranges.

Then there was “S3D Shooting Guides: Needed Tools for Stereo 3D Shooting” by Panasonic’s Michael Bergeron. The presentation compared indicators used by videographers to achieve appropriate gray scale and color to indicators they might use to achieve appropriate depth.

In a similar vein, Bergeron extended the concept of the “seven-second” obscenity delay (which allows producers of live programming to cut from inappropriate material to “safe” pictures and sounds) to a “seven-second stereo delay” that would allow stereographers to cut away from, say, window violations in live programming.

There was much more at the conference. Instead of only stereoscopic TVs with only active glasses or spatial-resolution-reducing patterns for passive glasses, a RealD presentation described a passive-glasses system with full resolution. Martin Banks, of the Berkeley lab, described the temporal effects of different frame rates and image-presentation systems (as shown above).

Unlike this post, which must be viewed without benefit of 3D glasses, “I Can See Clearly Now — in 3D,” by Norm Hurst of SRI/Sarnoff, was presented entirely in stereoscopic 3D. That helped audience members see how a test pattern can be used to determine 3D characteristics with nothing more than a stereoscopic 3D display.  It was previewed at the HPA Tech Retreat in February (http://www.schubincafe.com/2011/03/27/ex-uno-plures/).

I’ve mentioned only about half of the presentations at the conference, and I’ve offered only a tiny fraction of the content of even those. SMPTE used dual 2K images on a 4K Sony projector to allow stereoscopic content examples to be viewed with RealD glasses but without view alternation (though even that arrangement introduced an interesting artifact identified by Hurst’s test pattern). As many of the speakers pointed out, we still have a lot to learn about 3D. And, if you didn’t attend SMPTE’s conference, you’ll need to learn more still. Better at least join SMPTE so you can read the full papers that get published in the Journal (http://www.smpte.org).

—

The following comment was received from Mark Lucente:

“As I described in my talk, holographic video had been theorized and discussed for decades (going back to Dennis Gabor in the 1950s!). However, researchers at the MIT Media Lab (Prof. Stephen Benton, myself, and one other graduate student) were the first to ever BUILD a working real-time 3D holographic display system — in 1990. The title of my talk ‘The First 20 Years of Holographic Video…’ refers to 20 years of the existence of working displays, rather than theoretical.

“On a related note, just to be sure, Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks made the first laser-based 3D holograms. These were photographic — not real-time video. In other words, they were permanent recordings of 3D imagery, not real-time display of moving images. They were both brilliant, and contributed to the theoretical foundations of what eventually (in 1990) became the first-ever actual working holographic video system at MIT.”

Tags: 3d, 3dtv, cyclovergence, depth cues, depth perception, holographic, layered 3D, Leith Upatnieks, SMPTE 3D, stereoscopic, temporal artifacts, vergence-accommodation conflict, vertical disparity

Ex uno plures

There were many wonders at the 17th-annual HPA Tech Retreat in February in the California desert. And many of the more-than-500 attendees at the Hollywood Post Alliance were left wondering. One thing they wondered about was how to accommodate all viewers from a single master or feed.

As usual, many manufacturers introduced new products at the event (it’s where, in the past, Panasonic first showed its Varicam and Sony first showed HDCAM SR). But this year even the best products gave one pause.

Consider, for example, the Kernercam 3D rig, shown at left. It is transportable from set to set in three relatively small packing cases (far left). It takes just a few minutes to go from those cases to shooting. Each individual camera subassembly (bottom right of the image at left, shown with a Sony P1 camera) is pre-adjusted to the desired stereoscopic alignment parameters. After that, the two camera modules (with almost any desired cameras) just snap into the overall rig, with no readjustment necessary. The mounts are so rugged that repeatedly snapping cameras in and out or even hitting them does not change the 3D alignment.

That’s great, right? For many purposes, it probably is. But some stereoscopic camera-rig manufacturers, such as 3ality, are justifiably proud that their rigs do not use fixed alignment and can, therefore, be adjusted even during shots.

The choice of a super-rugged, fixed mount or a less-rugged, remotely adjustable mount is just that, a choice, and directors, cinematographers, & videographers have been making choices all their professional lives. The result of those choices adds up to a desired effect. Or does it?

Sony also introduced new products at this year’s HPA Tech Retreat. One, SR Memory, with the ability to store up to a terabyte of data on a solid-state memory “card” and a transfer rate allowing four live uncompressed HD streams simultaneously, falls into that category of choice. It’s also a wonder of new technology (though retreat attendees were given a preview in 2010, as shown in the picture at right, from Adam Wilt’s excellent coverage of last year’s HPA Tech Retreat, http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/awilt/story/hpatr2010_4/P1/).

Another new Sony introduction, OLED reference monitors, might have introduced a different kind of wonder. Some in attendance were delighted by what seemed like perfect image reproduction in something that (in one size, at least) will fit in a standard equipment rack. Others thought that existing larger devices already offer sufficiently good reference monitoring.

The way Sony conducted its demonstration, the new monitor was placed between Sony’s own reference-grade LCD and CRT monitors. With 24-frame-per-second source material, the CRT image flickered perceptibly. In black image areas, the LCD was noticeably lighter. The OLED suffered from neither problem. But is that necessarily good?

Many home viewers still watch TV on picture tubes. Many others watch on LCD displays. Others watch plasma or DLP. Some view images roughly 60 times a second, others 120, 240, or even 480 times a second. Some watch TV in dimly lit living rooms. Others watch on mobile devices outdoors in the sun. Still others watch content shot with the same cameras on giant projection screens in cinema auditoriums or even bigger LED screens in sports stadiums. The problem is that we are no longer shafted.

We were originally shafted in 1925 — literally! In that year, John Logie Baird was probably the first person to achieve a recognizable video image of a human face. A picture of the apparatus he used is shown at right. At far right is the original subject, a ventriloquist’s dummy’s head called Stooky Bill. The spinning disks on the shaft were used for image scanning. But the shaft extended from the camera section to a display section in the next room. It was impossible to be out of sync.

Another television pioneer was Philo Taylor Farnsworth, probably the first person to achieve all-electronic television (television in which neither the camera nor the display use mechanical scanning). His first image, in 1927, was a stationary dollar sign.

Although Farnsworth deserves credit for achieving all-electronic television, he was not the first to conceive it. Boris Rosing came up with the picture tube in 1907 in Russia, and the following year Alan Archibald Campell Swinton came up with the concept of all-electronic television in Britain. His diagram (left) was published a few years later. Although the idea of tube-based cameras might seem strange today, the first video camera to be shown at an NAB exhibit that did not use a tube didn’t appear until 1980 (and then only in prototype form), and tubeless HD cameras didn’t begin to appear until 1992.

Tube-based cameras and TVs with picture tubes didn’t have the physical shaft of Baird’s first apparatus, but they were still effectively shafted. When the electron beam in the camera’s tube(s) was at the upper left, the electron beam in the viewer’s picture tube was in the same position. Tape could delay the whole program, but it didn’t change the relationship.

The introduction of solid-state imaging devices changed things. An image might be captured all at once but displayed a line at a time, resulting in “rubbery” table legs as a camera panned past them. Camera tubes and solid-state imaging devices also had other differences. We’ve learned to work with those differences as well as the ones between different display technologies.

Now there’s 3D. I’ve written before about 3D’s other three dimensions, and their effect on depth perception: pupillary distance (between the eyes, especially different between adults and children), screen size, and viewing distance. See, for example, http://www.schubincafe.com/2010/03/14/the-other-three-dimensions-of-3dtv/. There are other issues associated with individual viewers, who might be blind in one eye, stereo blind, have limited fusion ranges (depths at which the two stereoscopic images can fuse into one), long acquisition times (until fusion occurs), etc.

There are also display-technology issues. One is ghosting. A presentation in the HPA Tech Retreat’s main program was called “Measurement of the Ghosting Performance of Stereo 3D Systems for Digital Cinema and 3DTV,” presented by Wolfgang Ruppel of RheinMain University of Applied Sciences in Germany. Ruppel presented test charts used to measure various types of ghosting for commonly used cinema and TV display systems. A trimmed version of one of his slides appears at left. It’s taken (with permission) from Adam Wilt’s once-again excellent coverage of the 2011 HPA Tech Retreat (which includes the full slides and the names of the stereoscopic display systems, http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/awilt/story/hpa_tech_retreat_2011_day_4/).

Ruppel’s paper also looked at the effects of ghosting suppression systems and noted color shifting. Some systems shifted colors towards yellow, others towards blue, and at least two systems shifted the colors differently for the two eyes! Can one master recording deliver accurate color results to cinemas when one auditorium might use one 3D display system and another a different one?

In one of the demo rooms, SRI (Sarnoff Labs) demonstrated a different test pattern for checking stereoscopic 3D parameters. It is shown above with the left- and right-eye views side by side. The crosstalk (ghosting) scale is shown at right in a demonstration of the way it would look with 4% crosstalk. The pattern can also be used to check synchronization between eye views, using the small, moving white rectangles shown just to the right of center below the eye-view identification.

There were other Sarnoff demonstrations, however, that indicated that synchronization of eye views is not as simple as making them appear when they are supposed to. Consider, for example, the current debate about the use of active glasses vs. passive glasses in 3DTVs.

Active glasses shutter the right eye during the left eye’s view and then shutter the right eye during the left eye’s view. Passive glasses usually involve a pattern of polarizers on the screen sending portions of the image (typically every other row) to one eye and the rest to the other (although there are also passive-glasses systems that use a full-image optical-retarder plate to alternate between left-eye and right-eye images).

Above are side-by-side right-eye and left-eye random-dot-type images used in another of the SRI demos. If you cross your eyes so they form a single image, you should see a circular disc, slightly to the right of the center, floating above the background.

That’s a still image.  SRI’s demo had multiple displays of moving images.  One used active glasses and another simultaneous-image passive glasses.

When the sequence was set for the left- and right-eye views to move the disc simultaneously side to side, that’s exactly what viewers looking at the passive display saw. But, with the exact same signal feeding the active-glasses display, viewers of that one saw the disc moving in an elliptical path into and out of the screen as well as back and forth. With the selection of a different playback file, the Sarnoff demonstrators could make the active-glasses view be side to side and the passive-glasses view be elliptical.

The random-dot nature of the image assured that no other real-world depth cues could interfere. But how significant would the elliptical change be in real-world images?

That’s one thing SRI wants to figure out, so they can come up with a mechanism to rate the quality of stereoscopic images in the same way that their JND (just-noticeable differences) technology has been used to evaluate the quality of non-stereoscopic imagery in the era of bit-rate-reduced (“compressed”) recording and distribution.

It’s not easy to figure out. One SRI sequence of slowly changing depth caused one researcher to get queasy. As can be seen at left, however, it didn’t bother another viewer at all.

We’re just beginning to learn about the many factors that can affect both 2D (consider those CRT, OLED, and LCD displays at the Sony demo, as well as others not shown) and 3D viewing. But there’s no turning back.

The motto carried in the beak of the eagle on the Great Seal of the United States is often translated as “Out of Many, One.” The title of this post means “Out of One, Many,” the problem faced by those creating moving-image programming in the post-shafted era.

That’s the front of the Great Seal. The back has two more mottoes: One, Novus Ordo Seclorum, emphasizes the impossibility of returning to the shaft. We’re in “A New Order of the Ages.” The other, Annuit Coeptis, I choose to translate as “Might As Well Smile About These Undertakings.”

 

 

Tags: 3d, 3dtv, active glasses, Alan Archibald Campbell Swinton, crosstalk, ghosting, HPA Tech Retreat, John Logie Baird, Kernercam, OLED, passive glasses, Philo Taylor Farnsworth, RheinMain University, Sarnoff, SR Memory, SRI

3DTV Today: One Step Back

The Society of Motion-Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) just completed an International Conference on Stereoscopic 3D for Media and Entertainment, what it calls “the only scientific gathering focused exclusively on 3D.”  Like many SMPTE conferences, it gazed into the future, with one presentation introducing “the need for additional image processing to get pixel-level geometry matching,” another discussing “Spatial Phase Imaging technology” that “can be made to work with any existing sensor-optics combination, making it amenable to a plethora of applications,” and yet another was titled “What Is Holographic Television, and Will It Ever Be in My Living Room?”

By the accounts of those who attended the event, it was jam-packed with terrific information.  This post, however, is not about the future of 3DTV but about its present.  And it won’t even delve into issues of 3D vision.

The image above is a portion of a television image of the face of Sir James Wilson Vincent Savile, better known as the entertainer Jimmy Savile.  It is clearly a black-&-white image, and it’s from this fascinating web site about experiments to allow color to be recovered from black-&-white video recordings: http://colour-recovery.wikispaces.com/Richard+Russell’s+experiments

The reason the color can be recovered is the same reason the image looks so bad.  When “compatible” color was created, it added a supposedly invisible color subcarrier to the video signal.  But it wasn’t invisible.  People who had been watching pristine images on their black-&-white TVs suddenly got extra dot and line patterns in their pictures.  Those with color TVs got less detail.

When sound was added to movies, something similar happened.  At the left is the four-units-wide by three-units-high (4:3 or 1.33:1 aspect ratio) frame of silent movies.  When a soundtrack was added, it impinged on the frame, giving the picture shape a much squarer 1.16:1 aspect ratio.  The so-called Academy aperture shrunk the picture (losing resolution) to return to a somewhat wider shape (1.375:1).

Now, in this age of digital (no more dot pattern) high-definition (widescreen with no resolution loss) TV, 3DTV sets are being sold.  They can deliver an added sensation of depth (assuming all goes well).  Do they cause anything to be lost as a result?

The picture above is a portion of one eye’s view of a 3D pair of photos shot by Pete Fasciano during a presentation he taught on July 21 about stereoscopic 3D.  I’ve trimmed it to an HDTV-like 16:9 aspect ratio.  Had it been a TV show shot in HDTV, it might have looked like the above.

Someday, we might have a form of 3DTV that will deliver left-eye and right-eye images separately, with full spatial and temporal resolution.  Today, what we have is the HDMI 1.4a standard.  It calls for the above for 1080i HDTV 3D.  The left- and right-eye views are placed side by side and squeezed into the HDTV frame.  Instead of 1080i HDTV’s 1920 pixels across, there are just 960 for each eye’s view.

For today’s 3DTVs that use active-shutter glasses, that’s the only resolution loss.  But some 3DTVs use passive glasses, with different eye views on different scanning lines.  If that’s the case, the side-by-side configuration drops the horizontal resolution from 1920 to 960, and the passive-glasses system drops the vertical from 1080 to 540.

HDMI 1.4a calls for the above for 720p HDTV 3D.  In this case the left-eye image is placed above the right-eye image.  Of course, that drops the vertical resolution from 720 lines to 360.  Now let’s add closed captioning.

Above is a simulated HDTV image with a closed caption.  Were this post about stereoscopic 3D and human vision, I might have pointed out that the caption is in the screen plane, so there will be a visual conflict between it and anything it is occluding that is set to come forward from the screen plane.  But this post is not about that.

Above is the same closed caption, generated, perhaps, by a cable, satellite, or telephone-company set-top box.  The caption appears where the box, not knowing about 3D, thinks it should appear.

Finally, when the captioned 1080i HDTV 3D signal from the set-top box enters the 3DTV, this is the result.  The caption is split in two, is elongated, and appears only half the time.  I’ve illustrated that last by making the caption appear transparent, but it might be a little worse than that.  The portion on the right will appear when the left-eye shutter of active glasses is open; the portion on the left will appear when the right-eye shutter is open.

From a technology standpoint, it’s relatively easy to design a system in which none of these problems will exist.  The presenters and attendees of the SMPTE International Conference on Stereoscopic 3D for Media and Entertainment might be doing that right now.  Unfortunately, 3DTVs are being sold today.

Tags: 3d, 3dtv, Academy aperture, closed caption, color recovery, HDMI 1.4a, Pete Faciano, resolution loss, set-top box, soundtrack

The Elephant in the Room: 3D at NAB 2010

As I roamed the exhibits at the NAB show this month, I kept wondering what other year it seemed most like.  And I was not alone.

There were plenty of important issues covered at the show, from citizen journalism to internet-connected TV.  And then there was the elephant in the room.

It would be a lie to say that 3D technologies could be found at every booth on the show floor.  But it was probably the case that there was 3D in at least every aisle.  There was so much 3D that it tended to diminish all other news.

In acquisition technology, for example, LED lighting was near ubiquitous, with focusable instruments, such as the Litepanels Sola, sometimes painfully bright.  Panasonic and Sony both showed models of future inexpensive video cameras with large-format imagers, and Aaton joined the range of those offering “digital magazines” for film cameras.  In small formats, GoPro’s Hero is a complete HD camcorder weighing just three ounces.

In storage technology, Cache-A, For-A, IBM, and Sony all showed in new offerings that tape is not dead.  Meanwhile, iVDR removable-hard-drive storage could be seen in several new products, and Canon introduced new camcorders based on Compact Flash cards.

Cinedeck looks like a viewfinder but includes built-in storage and editing capability. NextoDI’s NVS 2525 can copy either P2 or SxS cards.

In processing, Dan Carew’s Indie 2.0 blog said of Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve 7.0, “this best-in-class color correction software was formerly US$250,000 (for software and hardware) and is now available in a Mac software only verions for US$995.” http://indie2zero.com/2010/04/16/what-i-liked-and-saw-at-nab-2010/ Immersive Media’s 11-camera spherical views can now be stitched and streamed live.  NewTek’s TriCaster TCXD850 can deal with 22 inputs and virtual sets.  And, though you might not yet be able to figure out why you’d want this capability, Snell’s Kahuna 360 production switcher can deal with up to 16 shows at once.

In wireless distribution, there was VµbIQ’s 60 GHz uncompressed transmitter on a chip and Streambox’s Avenir for bonding up to four cellular modems to create a 20 Mbps channel.  In wired, there was Pleora’s EtherCast palm-sized bidirectional ASI-IP gateways.  And, in technologies that could be applied to either, there were Fraunhofer’s codec with a latency of just one macroblock line and a Harris-LG/Zenith proposal for expanding ATSC mobile transmission to full-channel use.

In presentation, there was a reference picture monitor from Dolby (seen in almost its final form at the HPA Tech Retreat).  Several booths had OLED monitors, from 7-inch at Sony to 15-inch at TVLogic.  Wohler’s Presto router has an LCD video display on each button.  And Ostendo’s CDM43 is a curved monitor with a 30:9 aspect ratio.

That barely scratches the surface of the non-3D news from NAB.  And then there was 3D.

Even All-Mobile Video’s Epic 3D production truck, parked in Sony’s exhibit, wore 3D glasses.  But it was the glasses on visitors to the truck that proved more instructive.

Sony provided RealD circularly polarized glasses to visitors for looking at everything from relatively small monitors to a giant outdoor-type LED display.  As soon as those visitors entered the control room of AMV’s Epic 3D truck and donned their glasses, however, they saw ghosting — crosstalk between the two eye views.  AMV staff were prepared for the shocked looks.  ”Sit down,” they said.  ”There’s a narrow vertical angle, and you have to be head-on to the monitors.”  Sure enough, that solved the problem — at least for those who could sit.

Another potential 3D problem was mentioned in the two-day 3D Digital Cinema Summit before the show opened.  If 3D is shot for a small screen and blown up to cinema size, it can cause eye divergence.  3ality’s camera rigs indicate when this might happen, but it happened anyway on at least one cinema-sized screen at NAB, leading to some audience queasiness.

Buzz Hays of the Sony 3D Technology Center says making 3D is easy, but making good 3D is hard.  There was a lot of 3D at NAB, including both easy and hard, good and bad.

It was hard to count the number of side-by-side and beam-splitter dual-camera rigs at the show, but, in addition to those, there were integrated (one-piece) 3D cameras and camcorders, in various stages of readiness, from 17 different brands, both on and off the show floor.  It seems that all of them were said to be “the first.”

Much could be learned about 3D at the two-day Digital Cinema Summit before the show opened.  It began with Sony’s Pete Lude showing that an ordinary 2D picture can seem 3D when viewed with just one eye, leading a later speaker (me) to quip that watching with an eye patch, therefore, is an inexpensive way to get 3DTV.

3ality’s Steve Schklair followed Lude with an on-screen, live demonstration-tutorial on the effects of different 3D rig settings: height, rotation, lens interaxial, convergence, etc.  He was followed by directors, stereographers, and trainers of 3D-convergence operators, among others.

Although 3D would seem to require more equipment (two cameras and lenses plus a stereo rig at each location) and more personnel (a convergence operator per camera in addition to a stereographer), there is seemingly one saving grace.  According to Schklair and others, 3D can get away with fewer cameras and less cutting than 2D.

The same thing was said of HD, however, in its early days.  Sure enough, when I worked on one show in 1989, we used just four HD cameras feeding the HD truck and twice as many non-HD cameras feeding the non-HD truck.  In the early days, it was common practice to do separate HD and SD productions.  Today, of course, one HD production feeds all, and it typically uses as many cameras and as rapid cutting as an SD show.

Atop a tower of Fujinon’s NAB booth, Pace showed something that recognizes the current economics of 3D.  With virtually no 3DTV audience, it’s hard to justify separate 3D productions, but, with such major players as ESPN, DirecTV, Discovery, and Sky involved in 3D, the elephant cannot be ignored, either.  So the Pace Shadow system places a 3D rig atop the long lens of a typical 2D sports camera.  Furthermore, it interconnects the controls (in a variety of selectable ways) so that the operator of the 2D camera need not be concerned about shooting 3D: one camera position, one operator, different 2D and 3D outputs.

Screen Subtitling came up with similarly clever solutions to the problem of 3D graphics.  Unless text is closer to the viewer (in 3D depth) than the portion of the image that it is obscuring, it can be uncomfortable to read.

Traditionally, subtitles are at the bottom of a screen, where 3D objects are closest to the viewer.  Raise the graphics to the top, and they might work in the screen plane.

Then there’s the issue of putting the graphics on the screen.  With left- and right-eye views, it might seem that two keying systems are required.  But with much 3D being distributed in a side-by-side format, a single keyer can place 3D graphics directly into the side-by-side feed.

There was much more 3D at the show, in every field of video technology (and, perhaps even audio).  In acquisition, for example, aside from integrated cameras, 3D mounts, and even individual cameras designed specifically for 3D (like Sony’s HDC-P1), there were also 3D lens adaptors, precision-matched lenses, precision lens controls, and even relay optics intended to allow wider cameras to be placed closer together, as in this picture shot by Eric Cheng of WetPixel.com: http://wetpixel.com/i.php/full/2010-nab-show-report-las-vegas/

At the other end of the 3D chain, there were both plasma and LCD autostereoscopic (no-glasses) displays using both lenticular and parallax-barrier technology, small OLED displays with active-shutter glasses and giant LED screens with passive circularly polarized glasses.  There were LCD and plasma screens (up to 152-inch at Panasonic) and DLP rear-projectors using active-shutter glasses, and both LCD and laser projection using passive polarized glasses.

There were dual-panel displays with beam splitters, and displays intended to be viewed through long strips of fixed polarized materials (to accommodate all viewers’ heights).  There were many anaglyph displays in the three-different primary-and-complement color combinations.  There were 3D viewfinders using glasses and others with displays for each eye.

Japan’s Burton showed a laser-plasma display that creates 3D images in mid-air.  Normally, they’ve viewed through laser-protection goggles, as in the image at the right at the top of this post.  But as a safety measure, they showed them instead inside an amber tube at NAB.

In storage, it seems that everyone who had anything that could record images had a version that could do so in 3D.  Even Convergent Design’s tiny Nano was available in a 3D version.  The Abekas Mira is an eight-channel digital production server — or it’s a four-channel 3D digital production server.  Want an uncompressed 3D field recorder?  Keisoku Giken’s UDR-D100 was just one such product at the show.

In processing, just about every form of editing and processing had a 3D version.  Monogram showed a touch-screen 3D “truck-in-a-box” production system.  Belgium’s Imec research lab even showed licensable technology for stereoscopic virtual cameras.

There was a range of equipment and services for converting 2D to 3D either in real time or not, automatically and with human assistance.  And there was a large range of processing equipment designed to fix 3D problems, such as camera rotation and height variation.

Sony’s MPE200 is one such device, with a U.S. list price of $38,000.  The MPES3D01/01 software to run it, however, is another $22,500.  With the least-expensive 3D camera at the show (Minoru 3D) retailing for under $60 at amazon.com, it might be said that 3D is cheap, but good 3D costs.

There was 3D test equipment from many manufacturers.  There was high-speed 3D (Antelope/Vision Research). There was 3D coax (Belden 1694D, complete with anaglyph color coding).  Ryerson University is doing eye-tracking research on what viewers look at in 3D and whether it’s different from HD and 4K.

So why was I wondering what year it was?  At NAB shows there have been many technologies shown that never went anywhere.  We still await voice-recognition production switchers, for example, and also voice-recognition captioning.  But those have generally been shown by only one company or a small number of exhibitors.

Digital video effects were among the fastest technologies to penetrate the industry.  First shown at NAB in 1973, they were commonly seen in homes by the end of the decade.

Then there was HDTV.  Its penetration after NAB introduction took much longer, even if dated only from 1989, when an entire exhibition hall was devoted to the subject (there were many earlier NAB displays).  Estimates vary, but U.S. household penetration of HDTV 21 years later seems to be in the vicinity of half.

At least HDTV did eventually penetrate U.S. households.  Visitors to NAB conventions in the early 1980s could see aisle after aisle of exhibits claiming compatibility with one or both competing standards for teletext.  One standard was being broadcast on CBS and NBC; the other on TBS.  There were professional and consumer equipment manufacturers and services offering support.  Based on the quantity and diversity of promotion at NAB, it was hard to imagine that teletext would not take off in the U.S.

So, will 3DTV emulate digital effects, HDTV, U.S. teletext, or none of the above?  Time will tell.

Tags: 3ality, 3d, 3dtv, Aaton, Abekas, All-Mobile Video, Burton, Buzz Hays, Cache-A, Canon, Cinedeck, Convergent Design, Digital Cinema Summit, For-A, Fujinon, GoPro Hero, immersive media, iVDR, Keisoku Giken, Litepanels Sola, Minoru 3D, Monogram, NAB 2010, NewTek, NextoDI, Ostendo, Pace, Panasonic, Pete Lude, Screen Subtitling, Snell, Sony, Steve Schklair, VµbIQ

3D Is Wonderful, Except….

Richard Sandomir of The New York Times was among the press who attended yesterday’s demonstration of what 3D Masters coverage might look like, and he wrote a glowing review of it that appeared in today’s paper: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/sports/golf/01threedee.html

It begins, “If the test footage shot recently at the Augusta National Golf Club is an authentic gauge, the Masters in 3-D will look terrific.”  And, until the very end of the article, it seemed only to get better still.

At the very end, however, Sandomir acknowledged some “flaws,” one that “blurred” the picture, another that was “visually jarring,” and a third that “was dizzying.”  The review ends with a quote:

“‘We’re figuring out what works and what doesn’t,’ said Mark Francisco, a Comcast Fellow working on 3-D.”

Tags: 3d, 3dtv, Comcast, Masters

Cheerleader Says Whoa!

A recent editorial said of 3DTV, “Let’s back away from irrational exuberance….”  Was it written by a broadcaster or program producer worried about losing audience to those offering 3DTV?  Not exactly.

Here’s the first sentence of the editorial writer’s official biography: “Gary Shapiro is president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the U.S. trade association representing some 2,000 consumer electronics companies and owning and producing the world’s largest tradeshow for consumer technology, the International CES.”  As such, he is, among other things, the cheerleader-in-chief for the organizations manufacturing 3DTVs.

Yet his editorial in the current (March/April) issue of Vision magazine calls for some braking of the 3DTV steamroller.  ”We must agree on standards so consumers can invest in glasses.  We must understand that those with eye issues, monovision or susceptibility to motion sickness may not appreciate 3D.  We need to qualify consumers and set their expectations to avoid 3DTV returns.  We need to understand the benefits and any potential harm from 3D viewing.”

There’s lots more here: http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/cea/vision0310/index.php?startid=2#

It’s well worth reading.

Tags: 3dtv, CEA, Gary Shapiro, monovision, motion sickness

2D (not 3D) Glasses

We’ve all heard about 3D glasses.  There are so many varieties that Rainbow Symphony offers so-called “Ultimate 3D Glasses” (shown here).  They work with many, but by no means all, forms of 3D.  Here’s a link to their site: http://www.rainbowsymphony.com/ultimate-3d-glasses.html

But, since January 11, I’ve been writing about 2D glasses, rather than 3D.  I’ve decided to consolidate my posts on the subject into one.

It began with a story in the UK Telegraph on January 11.  The story was headlined “Do 3D films make you sick?” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/6952352/Do-3D-films-make-you-sick.html

It was by no means a condemnation of 3D, and it clearly noted it was referring to a minority of viewers, but it stated that “a significant minority of the population cannot sit through a 3D film without experiencing discomfort.”  Those are viewers in cinemas, where issues of visual accommodation-vergence conflict are minimal (see my post “3DTV: Home and the Range” about the more significant issues in homes: http://schubincafe.com/blog/2009/11/3dtv-home-and-the-range/). More »

Tags: 2d, 2d glasses, 3d, 3d discomfort, 3d sickness, 3dtv, Avatar, College of Optometrists in Vision Development, DuMont Duoscopic, Early Television Museum, eye fatigue, Sky 3d, stereoblind, stereoblindness, ultimate 3d glasses

This Thing Called 3D

It has been a heck of a month for 3D announcements.  Comcast carried The Final Destination in 3D on the day of its DVD release. The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) seemed all about 3D.  The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) issued a report on 3D TV.  The program recently posted for next month’s Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA) Tech Retreat includes not only a 3D-in-the-Home “supersession” but also other presentations on such issues as 3D gaming, 3D projection, 3D vision, and, from Adobe, 3D video stabilization.  Electronic Engineering Times (EET) ran a story on January 21 about an agreement between France’s CEA-Leti and U.S. firm R3Logic “to develop 3D design methodologies for consumer and wireless applications.”  And Computerworld on January 27 talked about 3D video graphics chips moving from games to medical imaging.

What does it all mean?  That’s the sort of question one might ask after reading the front page of a newspaper, one carrying perhaps a dozen stories on different topics, because the 3D discussed in the above paragraph also covers multiple topics, not all of them associated with depth perception. More »

Tags: 3d, 3d glasses, 3D TV, 3dtv, active-shutter, Adobe, American Paper Optics, AnaChrome, anaglyph, Business Week, CES, ChromaDepth, chromostereopsis, chromostereoscopic, ColorCode, Comcast, Communications Research Centre, Computerworld, Curtin University, Depth Enhanced Video, Digital Optical Television Systems, Discovery HD, EE Times, Final Destination, flicker vision, Fox, Fraunhofer Institut, GEForce, Hollywood Post Alliance, holography, HPA, immersive media, integral television, ITU, KMQ, LeaVision, lenticular, live holography, multi-view, NG3D, NHK, NICT, NVidia, over-under, Panoramic stereoscopic, polarized, Prisma-Chrome, prismatic glasses, Pulfrich, RabbitHoles, Rolling Stones, side-by-side, SMPTE, Steel Wheels, Stereographics, stereoscopic, Thomas Edwards, Tournament of Roses, TrioScopics, ultra-high-definition, VH1, Vision III, wiggle vision, wobble stereoscopy