Went along last night to the
Bafta 3D TV event last night, showcasing the latest in 3D television and screen technology as well as a discussion session. Absolutely fascinating stuff. As far as the technology, I am going to show my deep admiration of
Roo Reynold's writeup of the technology (and my deep lazyness) by copying it wholesale. The main technologies on display were:
1. Active LCD shutter glasses darken one eye, then the other, in sync with the alternating image being shown on a standard display. This halves the effective frame rate by sharing the display across both eyes, and being an active system requires power to operate the shutters and also to be in sync with the display. Expensive glasses, but off-the-shelf (though high-end) screens or projectors.
2. Passive polarised glasses work much like the old red and green glasses, but using polarised filters rather than red/green means you get a full colour experience. It means cheap, passive glasses but complicated and expensive screens and projectors. If you’ve seen a colour 3D movie, this was probably the way it was delivered.
3. Autostereoscopic display is a stupid name for a screen which displays 3D without needing glasses by use of a lenticular or ‘parallax barrier’ layer in front of a specialised (usually LCD) display, presenting a different image based on viewing position. No glasses, but a very limited viewing angle.
On the discussion panel were:
- Andrew Oliver (CTO and founder, Blitz Games Studios),
- Colin Smith (Technical Analyst, ITV),
- Brian Lenz (product design and innovation, Sky),
- Chair: Guy Clapperton (Freelance/Guardian journalist).
I'm afraid I didn't take many notes (Roo has some notes, read his post too) so will just give you the headlines as I saw them, along the good old 4 box media value chain:
Content Creation
Firstly, the amount of captured 3D content available is tiny today - but, it is possible to reprocess 2D digital content for 3D. There are 2 main axes of complexity:
- Content complexity - simple pictures where not a lot moves - eg cartoons - require far less reprocessing. A movie with lots of detail and lots of shot angles changing takes far more processing.
- Output size - The bigger the required screen, the more reprocessing required, so the cost of reprocessing for Web TV and home TV will be lower than for Cinemas
Secondly, it appears that capturing 3D images in essence resolves itself to strapping 2 cameras a distance apart and processing the 2 streams, thus getting binocular vision. This will be possible for pro-amateurs to do in fairly short order I suspect.
Thirdly, the most compelling content in my view was computer games and sport - both big markets for paying customers so I think the economic impetus is there
Aggregation
Different players are using these systems as ways to re-open the Set Top Box (STB) wars, ie 3D TV is an ideal way to force out the current STB and get your one in. Unfortunately there is a good old standards war (see 3 standards above) with different players promoting different systems, which will confuse the market. (In this case my hypothesis is that the home market will go with a system that means not replacing the existing TV set - option 1 above - which also seems to be the preferred option for computer gaming )
Distribution
Can be broadcast via TV, Internet or Mobile ad will be shipped on CD and DVD, so 3D will occur on all platforms. Thus any hope that this will allow Broadcast TV or Cinema to differentiate itself from IPTV/WebTV is in my view misplaced.
Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) market
I delved into the economics of the various approaches - for both the cheap glasses options you need to buy new TVs, whereas getting the complex glasses is sub £100 even today and will go down, but you get to keep your £600+ TV so option 1 looks best. Conversely for cinemas you probably want to have cheap glasses so option 2 or 3 are best. Killer question therefore in my view is what will work best on Web TV on laptops, will people be OK to spend heaphone sort of money for complex glasses.
I saw PC, XBOX and PS3 engines doing 3D rendering, the Wii has not go the oomph apparently (but imagine some of the Wii games in 3D).
Spent quite a lot of time asking about re-prpcessing existing content - my take is its early days, but ultimately this is like compression - its about getting good algorithms and then crunching them on bloody great engines, so I'd expect on-they-fly 3D reprocessing of simple graphics like games fairly soon commercially and then up the scale with more and more complex content on bigger and bigger screens.
A word on the Cinema market - watching sports or concerts in a cinema will be far more realistic with this sort of gear, but whether this will allow them to charge any form of premium for long is unclear.
At any rate, last night persuaded me that 3D TV in various forms is a 1-2 year not a 3-5 year event, unless the commercial wranglings make it profoundly economically uninteresting.
