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Science Technology

3D TV For The Masses? 116

Posted by timothy from the where's-ted-turner-when-you-need-him dept.
scubacuda writes: "Technology Review has an article on new software that could make 3D television a reality. Previously encumbered by an expensive process that takes up to nine cameras per scene, a company called DDD now takes existing 2D film and creates a "depth map" for each frame. A TV that can handle this sort of software rendering currently costs $25K, but DDD estimates that in a few years, a 3D TV could only cost only 20% more than its 2D counterpart."
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3D TV For The Masses? More

3D TV For The Masses?

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  • Quick, Invest in the Playboy Channel!
    • nuff said
    • It costs a MILLION PER FEATURE TO CONVERT!!! Way too much for porn.

      Of course, when people start using these nifty cameras [slashdot.org] that can record video depth as well, the additional cost for new 3D productions will be trivial.

      • Re:Make Billions... (Score:3, Informative)

        by plumby ( 179557 )
        Porn tends to be the one of the first industries to pick up on new technology (video, multiple camera angles in DVDs etc). They are looking for anything that gives them an edge in a very competitive market. Admittedly at $1M/feature it's probably too high, but if the price does drop, expect it to appear in porn well before it arrives in a holywood blockbuster.
        • It does sort of beg the question though - if porn is picking up 3d before anyone else, will you get dirty looks for buying a 3d tv?

          (at least with VCRs you were buying it to record TV first, and watch porn second).
    • Quick, Invest in the Playboy Channel!

      I'll wait till they invent smellTV for that... mmmm Jameson's underwear...

  • There's already 3D Movies! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Devil's BSD ( 562630 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @05:20PM (#3708906) Homepage
    You can probably go to a lot of theaters and get those goggles to watch a 3D movie. And I'm pretty sure those paper goggle thingys are dirt cheap, and the 3d movie is just made with 2 cameras & projectors instead of 1, so why would it cost $25k to make a funky little algorithm that can handle 2 CRT's and a dime store goggle set?
    • You can probably go to a lot of theaters and get those goggles to watch a 3D movie. And I'm pretty sure those paper goggle thingys are dirt cheap, and the 3d movie is just made with 2 cameras & projectors instead of 1, so why would it cost $25k to make a funky little algorithm that can handle 2 CRT's and a dime store goggle set?

      The difference is that this system extract real 3d DATA which could then be further manipulated.

      For more discussion on this topic please see the original /. posting about it about a year or so ago. :)
  • Imagine the bandwidth we are going to need to DL stolen copies of these babies.

    All at a time when cable companies are trying to wind back bandwidth useage.

    Fun.

  • Should make the future of 3d modelling more fun... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RyanFenton ( 230700 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @05:24PM (#3708921)

    Imagine being able to import such images. It would require either work to edit the 3-d shape so it had a "back" & smooth the shape a little, or else software to interpolate multiple images from different angles into one high resolution 3-d shape - but the opportunity to get a wide variety of shapes to start the process of modelling would be of great benefit to many artists and designers.

    Of course, the flip side to all this would be that individuals and organizations may start copyrighting shapes in addition to images. The first court cases over something "shaped like" a copyrighted object will be very interesting.

    :^)

    Ryan Fenton
    • this doesn't sound like it makes models... just takes a 2D image and makes it 3d WITHOUT multiple cameras... to get the backs of objects or to make true models you would need multiple cameras.

      1st post = funny
      2nd post = offtopic

      1st post == 2nd post => funny == offtopic
    • > Of course, the flip side to all this would be that individuals and organizations may start copyrighting shapes in addition to images. The first court cases over something "shaped like" a copyrighted object will be very interesting.

      Companies already do this. Things like case design of "deluxe" arcade cabinets are often copyrighted to prevent other manufacturers from making ripoffs. For example, Konami holds a copyright on the DDR cabinet - not that it's helped in dealing with the ripoffs from Korea/China/places with a lack of copyright law.
  • At the moment, people and computers add the 3D information to the film. To get it automatically added when the scene is filmed, you're still going to need fancy equipment, extra cameras or whatever. The display may cost 20% more, but how much more will the production cost and so how much will be filmed in 3D?

  • My GAWD! (Score:4, Funny)

    by t0qer ( 230538 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @05:28PM (#3708938) Homepage Journal
    Now my favorite pr0n star's cup size is REALLY gonna matter!

    Sorta adds a new dimension that TV will poke your eye out, or was that the red rider bb gun?

  • Or, you could wear goggles (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sam_handelman ( 519767 ) <samuel DOT handelman AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday June 15, 2002 @05:29PM (#3708944) Journal
    When viewing stereo images in the lab (3D displays of biological molecule structures) we wear special goggles. They work fine; none of that red and blue crap. If you're trying to find early adopters for a new tech, I'd think that 3D goggles plus software to display these movies on a computer would net you much more market penetrance than $25,000 dual-display televisions (or other expensive hardware gimmickry) which are only going to become cheaper if people start buying them, which they'll only do if content is available for them, which will open happen if there's some cheaper way to view the things. One of them vicious things, only good.

    Of course, they're using MPEG format. That may mean nothing, or it may mean that they're tied to the MPAA somehow, so encouraging people to watch movies on their computers may not be their business plan. I'm just spouting, I know nothing about "DDD".

    In fact, since it looks like HDTV is not going to be a vehicle for DRM, the movie/TV industry could try to develop and deploy some 3D display standard that shut out computers (using patents on the underlying technology), and move all new content into it. Frightening possibility.
    • remember the story that ran about mems and empty screens :
      http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/01/232254 &mode=nested&tid=137
      now with these it will probably reduce a lot the price for the monitors, and for goggles too, but more important if what was said in the discussion is true even the price for the cameras will go down by quite a lot, if so then using even 9 cams to get a perfet 3D video stream will be fine :) and then merging these streams in a dual stream each on a projector and then you get stereoscopy
      lets dream of a projeting column which you just have to look at at the right angle and you get 3D display of whatever you want video,images,your desktop(which is like hard drive, the more space you have the more space you need)...
      well lets stop dreaming?
    • Next plan, please.

      I already wear a pair of glasses. I don't wish to slap another one on top of them, or get polarized lenses.

  • Although 3D TV is just a step forward in multimedia we see in our day to day lives, which apparently started with the regular 2D TV in the 60's, it seems that soon futuristic technologies will be right around the corner. I remember watching Star Treck about 10 years ago and seeing the "Holadeck", where the crew could enter a "hologram-like" world, and interact with this world.

    Now it seems that this is not very far away! It maked me wonder what will happen to the human mind. It is common knowledge that reading books stimulates one's imagination a lot more than watching today's TVs or movies, for example. What will happen when we leave our children to enter "holodeck-fairy-tale-land".

    It seems man will start to become distant from nature. Is this a good or a bad thing? What are the consequences for a kid growing up in this new virtual "environment"?

    I definately the advantages to a hologram world, like visiting places you could not otherwise visit, and experience new things, but maybe this process has to be carefully thought out.

    I guess the a Matrix world is closer then I imagined...

    • I'm not sure this is really analogous. I think a better analogy would be the move from silent movies to talkies rather than the move from literature to movies. The experience is the same, just rendered more life-like.

      I am not sure there is much intellectual stimulation going on in the process of reading depth into a 2-D scene, at least not the same way there is in imagining the scene in the first place. But then, IANAN.

      (I am not a neurologist)
      -------
      We all live under Monkey Law [monkeylaw.org].

    • Well think about it. Some say "Life is the best teacher". What better than a real life hollo-deck to learn life lessons from?

  • Is this a joke? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jasno ( 124830 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @05:36PM (#3708966) Journal
    Ok, its been.. what? 15 years? since they started talking about HDTV? And you expect the people who can't even agree on a simple hi-def format to adopt and commercialize this?

    Hehe.. ok. I'll put this in the pile with all of the other schemes that are "only 5 years away".
    • Ok, its been.. what? 15 years? since they started talking about HDTV? And you expect the people who can't even agree on a simple hi-def format to adopt and commercialize this?

      Hehe.. ok. I'll put this in the pile with all of the other schemes that are "only 5 years away".

      Feh, TCI was promising that tv on demand was only five years away back in 1991.

      Weird how it took cable modems, DSL, and the rise of P2P networks to even get anything near tv on demand, hehe. :)

      (for those of you not in the know, TCI is now outa biz and was eaten up by AT&T, which some say itself is quickly going down the tube)
    • Because TV produccers apparently don't want to become LCD producers. Well, I fact, only a few companies can produce LCD displays (of whatever variant).

      If TV where just an LCD display connected to a Analog2Digital interface for the good old signals and then a new digital interface that can ask what the TV resolution/depth is and then just send the data to it.

      I'm not fully informed, but it all seems to be a problem. How can the computer industry display whatever at whatever resolution (projecting DVDs, Divx, VideoCD, etc. for example) without all that stupid HDTV non-sense? We just need a computerTV. Hey, sounds nice: CTV!

      Just dunble a transmeta chip, a cheapo mother an LCD and bundle a TV-in card, saver and you got something that will last more than HDTV and take advange of a lot more features than any TV.
  • It's hard enough (so much so that nobody's done it yet) to automatically recover a fully accurate depth map from a general stereo pair of still images, let alone a single still image.

    Don't believe the sales pitch. At the moment, automated depth mapping techniques are primitive and unreliable.

    http://www.ddd.com/technology/tech_main_frm.htm

    "Stage 3:
    Refining
    The DDC data generated by Stage 2 may be refined manually, finalizing the optimal basis for a 3D equivalent of the original 2D content."

    Or in other words:

    "we do stereo conversion the same way everyone does and has done since it all began - by hand"

    This isn't news.

  • but... (Score:3, Funny)

    by llamalicious ( 448215 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @05:38PM (#3708975) Journal
    my tv already is 3-D.
    I want it to get more 2-D !!!

    :)

  • 3D works really poorly on TV-sized screens (Score:4, Informative)

    by evenmoreconfused ( 451154 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @05:40PM (#3708985)
    Having spent the last 8 years developing content preparation technology for 3D presentation systems, I'd like to add my 2 cents.

    The problem with 3D TV, apart from all the viewing paraphenalia, is that it's not wide enough. Even in Imax 3D, with a field of view approaching 80 degrees, directors have problems composing shots that fit in the "viewable pyramid" formed by the viewer's nose and the four corners of the screen. (It's fairly well established that anything in 3D projection that clips this pyramid destroys the illusion of 3D, because one eye view clips before the other, causing the audience to be subconsiously disturbed in their viewing). In any case, the 3D effect only operates within this pyramid.

    This company has been pumped on and off for some time on various message boards that cover 3D - especially Imax boards. AFAIC, maybe their technology will do well on good 3D presentation systems, but TV-sized screens just won't cut it - all the tests I've seen of 3D on a TV are pretty much limited to novelty value.

    /stillconfused
    • Just curious, but is it possible to adjust the image alignment (for lack of a better term) such that the 3D effect is most pronounced in the center areas of the screen, and fades off at the edges, so that the clipping does not occur? Of course things would get flat at the edges, but it would eliminate the clipping. I haven't the slightest clue how that could be accomplished, but it seems that some clever digital editing could do the trick.
    • A close explanation, but not exactly right. The reason clipping the 3D pyramid is bad is because if one object is seen by one eye, but not the other at the edge of the screen, that object appears to be floating - destroying the illusion of the "stereo window". I've been a stereo photographer now for nearly 20 years, and floating edges are a common problem with photos taken by newbie stereographers. Stereo television can certainly work just fine on any size TV screen - I have NO idea where you got that BS. I have friends working with both field sequential and side by side 3D TV. I've dabbled with Super8 and 16mm stereo films myself, and they project fine at sizes from 12 inches on up to 70"x70". Perhaps if you've been working with Imax 3D they've given you this mis-information. Due to the large size screen, Imax 3D effectively has no stereo window limitations. The problem with 3D TV is a lack on content and the reluctance of the general public to pay a premium for the technology. Unfortunately, the inexpensive 3D TV system, field sequential, flickers noticably when shown on a standard NTSC television. While I wish DDD success in their venture - I'm not putting any money into it...
  • It's all great fun, unless you, like me, happen to be one of the estimated 20 - 40 percent of people who suffer from "simulator sickness". "Simulator sickness" is the virtual world's cousin to motion sickness, and it takes the form of strained eyesight, nausea, vertigo, headaches and vomiting. Of those who suffer simulator sickness, more than half feel only a twinge when watching T2 3D at Universal Studios, or playing Quake 3. For the remainder - still a sizeable percentage - the symptoms are so bad they simply cannot watch these movies, or play these games.

    It seems corporate america, and the bearded linux hippie game developers don't really care about the 17-20 percent of us who suffer badly. Somehow, this lack of concern feels familiar. I guess that's because I'm also a member of that other minority, left-handers, who are constantly ignored by most joystick and mouse manufacturers.

    The real worry is that the 3D mania will spread not just throughout TV programming and movies, but to other software, and we'll start seeing 3D databases (in fact, they already exist), disk defragmenters and even operating systems. I hope it doesn't go so far.

    I know many Slashdot readers love the 3D trend. As a (semi-dormant) programmer, I can't help but admire the realism of modern 3D graphics in movies, on TV, and in game engines. But I hope that developers wake up to the fact that they're making a sizeable slice of their potential customers sick to their stomachs.
    • Video game manufacturers have yet to realize how difficult it is for those with even slight red/green colorblindness to tell the difference between saturated yellow and saturated green. Super Puzzle Fighter is a perfect example.

      Web designers are also bad. You know how often I've seen red text in front of a greenish background? Or cyan in front of white?

      Even people like me who didn't realize that they had any color defiency until they started using computer and playing video games run into trouble when color is used to convey important information in the digital world.

      3D is the same way. There are a sizable percentage of people who are "monocular" and thus are unable to use goggle or lenticular based 3D solutions.

      Thats why we should all use:

      www.actuality-systems.com [actuality-systems.com]
    • Also, to show some respect for illiterates, let's stop using written language. And not use speech so as not to exclude the deaf. And draw everything in black and white, for the colour-blind.

    • I wonder what contributes to this effect -

      - the feeling of uncontrolled motion not controlled?
      - the rapid switching between camera angles?
      - the focusing on a scene with an unnatural perspective relative to the real world?
      - incorrect depth information for your viewing angle and location?
      - the lack of depth and limited luminescence and color?

      Regardless, 3d displays should amplify these effect significantly in all cases except the last. In particular, because of the new depth, won't this make a large difference on how far/close you should sit to the screen, and won't the effect differ for people depending on the distance between their eyes? And what about viewing the screen from an angle? If you aren't sitting in the sweet spot, the image could be warped or scaled to comic or sickening levels even for normal folks. Which is fine if you're watching alone and organize the furniture around the TV, assuming you're some anti-social videophile.

  • This is really exciting news for me, since the 3D games for the master system had gotten my hopes up for 3D tv in my early childhood. After having missles and such fly right out of the screen at you, it always seemed so disapointing going back to watching the A-Team or whatever. Those games gave me an impression I've never been able to shake that 3D TV would be right around the corner, and finally seventeen or so years later I've got some evidence to support that.

    It just turns out that my hunch of soon was more along the lines of game release date "soon".
  • So 3D TV should be out right around the time HDTV is supposed to be "out" (as in widespread).

    Somehow I don't think that we can pull off something that big in a few years, when adding a few extra lines of resolution is taking so long. What has it been, over 15 years now that HDTV is a couple years off?

  • Viewing angle (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bravehamster ( 44836 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @05:42PM (#3708998) Homepage Journal
    Anyone know what sort of viewing angle you get on this thing? Doesn't seem like you could have a very good viewing angle without losing the depth aspect of the image. This could really hurt acceptance, because most peoples homes have seating arrangements with quite significant angles to the TV.

  • sounds kind of like what bump mapping is used for with textures in 3D rendering.

  • I've seen this... its not that cool... (Score:5, Informative)

    by MasteroftheVoxel ( 162902 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @05:48PM (#3709015)
    I saw 3D lenticular displays exhibiting DDD's work at SIGGRAPH 2001 and SID (Society for Information Displays) 2002.

    I was not that impressed. Basically you see a large moving stereogram but the stereo separation is no where near as good as your average ViewMaster. Most of the time it doesn't look 3D at all. And your depth of field is very limited when it is 3D.

    I talked to them for a while about how their technology works. Basically, they attempt to interpolate around the edges of objects in the foreground. Sometimes they can't and that limits how close to the viewer an object can appear. For example, imagine a camera moving by a tree only a few feet in front of it and with a complex landscape in the background. Around the edges of the tree there should be new landscape that one eye would see and the other would not. There is no way to recover this image data because in the original film it was blocked by the tree. Thin objects, like wires or poles or window frames are also especially difficult. Most of the time it requires an artist to do some hand tuning of the images.

    I don't see what is special about their technique. Even if they do have some novel ideas for getting 3D out of 2D, I don't see how the data would be useful considering how bad 3D lenticular displays look - eg. limited depth of field, incorrect focal length for objects at different depths, very limited viewing angle.
  • *waits to be modded down for making too obscure a joke*
  • Are there households with 3d TV already? Because if not, then "3d TV for the masses?" doesn't make sense... "3d TV" or "3d TV!" is the concept. "...for the masses" is when the masses get something everyone above them has been enjoying for some time. For instance: "Linux for the masses?" or "Dom Perignon for the masses?"

    Personally, I'm more in the "3d TV ... " category.
  • I didn't know how to title this comment properly

    Anyway, if you take one camera angle and add to it a heightmap, You will have a 3d view, but only from one angle. You can't rotate the scene or anything like that. Well, you can, but there is no mechanism encoding what, for instance, is on the back of an object. You could do a limited level of rotation on the scene, and it would do neat perspective effects (objects closer to camera would move more than those farther back), however if you rotated around the scene 180 degrees.... yeah you see what I mean.

    It would look pretty damn cool looking from the front, however.
    • Anyway, if you take one camera angle and add to it a heightmap, You will have a 3d view, but only from one angle. You can't rotate the scene or anything like that. Well, you can, but there is no mechanism encoding what, for instance, is on the back of an object. You could do a limited level of rotation on the scene, and it would do neat perspective effects (objects closer to camera would move more than those farther back), however if you rotated around the scene 180 degrees.... yeah you see what I mean.

      It would look pretty damn cool looking from the front, however.

      Actualy this will all be taken care of one day by AI that will be able to interpolate the details in real time.

      Until then. . . . ;)

      Yah I have seen demonstrations of various '3d from 2d' technologies, and they all do have this problem. :(

      They do look exceedingly cool from that one view angle though. :)

      It actualy is a 3d surface, just a very hollow one. :)

    • You're thinking of gaming applications. Nobody rotates anything in realtime either in cinema or (non-live) TV. It's all done long before in some studio.

      The point is, can you take a pre-existing bitmap (i.e. one 2D frame) and change it into the two (slightly different) bitmaps - one left eye and one right eye - needed for a 3D presentation system. There is no other view ever needed because no self-respecting movie-maker would ever let you look at a scene from anywhere else except exactly where it was intended to be seen from!

      Note that:
      1) you can take as long as you want to figure it out, 'cause it's all happening offline.
      2) essentially, you're trying to create something from nothing - or at most just some hints.
      3) however, you can use earlier or later frames to help. For example, if the camera is moving left, the previous frame makes an excellent right eye view, and the subsequent one can be used for the right eye!

      /stillconfused

  • Binocular stereo barely matters (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @05:58PM (#3709038) Homepage
    This new system is just binocular stereo, not 3D. Moving your head won't let you look around something. Except for closeups, binocular stereo barely matters. Beyond about 2 meters, people can't tell anyway.

    The main optical depth cues are relative motion, depth of focus, and binocular stereo. If you can provide all three, it looks real, but if you can only provide one, it looks fake. The spherical-mirror illusion, even with projected 2D images, looks more real than binocular stereo. High-end flight simulators have displays that are focused at infinity, which gives you the feeling of looking out at the world, not at a screen. (Low-cost focused-at-infinity displays would be great for gaming, if the optics weren't too bulky.)

    Scaling of binocular 3D, where there's far more separation than the usual eye width, is a dramatic effect which is cool for about a minute, then is a pain. This is why the concept died in moviemaking.

    • I'm afraid your comparison is somewhat flawed:

      Binocular vision is - in all but a few special cases - insignificant beyond 10-20m. The reason flight simulators don't deal with this is that anything that's so close will be hit by the plane in about 0.1 seconds anyway, so who cares. In entertainment (and in real life, for that matter) anything important is almost always within that distance.

      That being said, the depth cues you mention are important, but there are lots of others too. The order of precedence / importance varies depending on the distance of the object, the viewer, the setting, the ambient lighting etc.

      If (and it's a big if) there are no contradictory references visible (such as frame borders), 2D (monocular) viewing effectively recreates all the cues except for two: stereo and depth of focus (of the eyeball, not the camera). 3D presentation adds the stereo vision and leaves only the depth of focus.

      Strange you say "the concept died in moviemaking" in light of the very successful NASA / Imax 3D film recently released about the building of the space station, which was shot using a special, purpose-built, light-weight camera that takes two 65mm frames simultaneously.
    • So not true. The whole, 'not effective beyond distance x' is nonsense. Maybe the rest of you can't tell the different between an object projecting a distance of 10ft vt 30ft, but I certain can; and no, I do not mean by way of focus etc. I mean purely by stereo-vision. I will admit that pure binocular stereo is unconvincing... the main reason I think it doesn't work so well is because it requires a fixed focus regardless of projected depth. Some people can adapt to fixed focus while still converging the images correctly, but most cannot. There is also the issue of light latency. Our eyes can easily detect microsecond differences in light to eye timing... which is why you can get 3d effect by putting a dark lense over one eye and spinning a single view on a regular monitor around in a circle... Honestly, it is all a waste of time. More serious optics analysis and light projection techniques need to be considered.

  • Not Gonna Happen (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Rubyflame ( 159891 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @05:59PM (#3709042) Homepage
    Call me a pessimist, but I don't think 3D TV will ever become popular. Something like a holodeck might, where you're inside the simulation, but a 3-dimensional set that you look at from outside probably won't.

    I say this because 2D and 3D images are really very similar unless you move your head around, and most people don't want to move their heads around. When people sit down to watch TV, they generally want to just sit there and do nothing.
    • Do you think it's the same to go to the theather than to watch it through your television? Think of that, and then think about 3D television. Imagine a BIG display with 3D objects. True 3D, not just some depth enhanced crap. It will happen, and 2D will become adandonware or "classic" just as B&W films.
  • Cool..does this mean I can rotate and zoom in on all sorts of stuff? Probably not :(

    O well..not that there's much interesting on on TV these days anyway..2d or 3d
  • What I wouldn't give to have a 3D TV hooked up through my TVout card, running MAME and playing a rousing round of Pachinko Sexy Reaction [the0rem.net] (hertofore to be referred to as "the best game ever"). Well, of COURSE you could play Doom or even Quake at lo-rez, but hell, who wouldn't wanna play PSR on a 3D TV?

    Fags, that's who.

  • "Solidized" won't be any better than "colorized." (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @06:22PM (#3709126) Homepage
    I just plain don't believe it. If the information isn't there to begin with, nothing's going to put it there. The "graphic artist" isn't going to be any better than the artists that tint pictures. Splodging an even flesh tint onto a black-and-white face doesn't reproduce the color variations of a real face,and nobody working at commercial pace is going to do more than a slapdash job of "painting" depth into a 2D picture.

    Colorized movies look impressive for about five minutes, then you gradually become aware of a sense of dissatisfaction. Your brain knows you're not getting much color information. These "solidized" movies will just as unsatisfying.

    In my humble opinion, of course... and not having seen any of the actual product.

  • Not great for visualizing people (Score:3, Funny)

    by waytoomuchcoffee ( 263275 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @06:36PM (#3709169)
    While 3d would be a blast for games, or cartoons, has anyone ever SEEN 3d holograms of people? You have a suspension of disbelief when seeing a flat 2d screen -- you don't think of them as 5" tall people. People rendered in 3d break this little fantasy the brain has worked up for itself, and you wind up seeing little moveable dolls.

    Maybe this effect goes away after a while, and someone with experience watching people as 3d holograms for days at a time (if anyone like that exists) can comment.
  • So I click on the link and get a screen which says "loading navigation". I hit the back button. 'nuff said.

  • "According to Pat Dunn, director of technology at DisplaySearch, an Austin, TX-based research and consulting firm, that's not all that is needed. "The question is, would you be able to get everyone to sign up for this, the film industry, the television industry, and display manufacturers? What would the cost burden be, and is the movie industry willing to shoulder that in order to have this technology?""
    • You would think considering Pat's company is in business to research this stuff, her comment would've answered more questions than it raised... She spoke, yet she said nothing.
    • You would think considering Pat's company is in business to research this stuff, her comment would've answered more questions than it raised... She spoke, yet she said nothing.

      She's the director of technology, not of marketing. It's astute that she's thinking out of the box of mere engineering, and acknowledging the huge hurdles beyond the technical challenges.

      Besides, sometimes learning to ask the right questions is half the trick...
      • I stop listening to people once they use the phrase "thinking out of the box".
        • Despite it being a terribly overused cliche, it is not a bad general principle. For an engineer to see beyond the mere engineering concerns is a positive thing.

          You should learn when a cliche is around because it's useful and true, and when it's around just because it's around, and not become prejudice based on that.

  • So let me get this straight.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by telstar ( 236404 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @07:05PM (#3709240)
    We can define the depth of everything on the screen by setting a start point and an end point and letting the algorithm interpolate everything in-between? And if it's off? You're either going to end up with a stretched, pixelated mess, or a bunch of anorexic midgets flying out of your TV.

  • 3D is not the end-all (Score:3, Informative)

    by rufusdufus ( 450462 ) on Saturday June 15, 2002 @07:07PM (#3709244)
    The idea that so many people have missed is that 3D for its own sake is just a gee-whiz widget.

    What they need to be aiming for is immersion.
    Immersion is the experience of being inside an environment rather than being an external viewer.
    You can get the immersive effect in 2D, and in fact this has been done with great effect by Disney on some of their rides.

    What factors influence the experience of immersion? Foremost is a wide viewing angle; this is where most 3D simulators fail. You must see 'reality' everywhere, not floating in box in front of your face. Also very important is proper audio cueing, as much of a human's experience of spatial orientation is from subtle echoes and pitch changes. Other things that I think add more to the experience than 3D is view tracking, an engaging plot line and breeze control. Also, odor control, as in it cant be stinky :)

    • Amen brother!

      When people think 3D they think stereoscopic - whichwe've had since 1915 [earthlink.net], believe it or not. However it's never been more than a gimmick because it really doesn't add much to the experience.

      The above poster is correct with regard to wide viewing angle. In the book The Visionary Position [amazon.com] they talk about the first immersive VR system completed in 1982:


      By experimenting with the display -- moving, by degrees, from a 20-degree field of view to a 30-degree field of view and so on up to 120 degrees, the team discovered that at the "60- to 80-degree point, it was like a switch went off in your head. Instead of looking at a picture, all of a sudden you thought you were in a place. You had a different way of interacting with the display. You brought in a different set of innate capabilities."


      Pretty cool sounding stuff. However, all the video improvements I've seen aim at higher resolution and stereoscopic display... things that hardly matter at all for "getting into" an image.

      Then there's the fact that none of this improves storytelling, which is still the most important aspect of a good TV/film experience.
      It could certainly help with interactive things like games.
    • Sound could be really improved. In a film, no motter how digital or whatever you always get the feeling the sounds come from the "walls" and not from the "objects". They sound great, come from a direction, but NOT from the object. If the screen is big it helps a lot to associate the object and the sound.

      So we need more curved displays and not just bigger. The bigger and bigger you make a flat surface, the more you have to step away from it, hurting again the experience.

      Maybe a large screen whose film KNOWs you'll be looking at the center mostly, so that the edges do not carry vital visual information, just "periferical info". If it thinks the screen is small and that you are seing ALL of it at a time, then they tend to use all the space available and you can't dive in (get close and use it as secondary info).

      And targeted sounds (headphones) accounting for how far and to the edges of the screen you are, + extra bass non headphones speakers (for enviroment trembling and body feeling of that tremble) is the way to go. They need to "tune" the sound so that it's physically right.

      The day realize you don't believe in reality because it could be a movie is the day we can claim to have done the right thing (well, i may be a disaster in reality :))
  • Who actually would prefer this to regular 2D? It'd be like destroying a whole artform--sometimes this is necessary for an evolutionary step, but the few 3D movies I've seen were horrible. Part of the magic of 2D movies is the perspective you get from a 3rd person viewer... right?
  • I've seen people try to make 3d out of a 2d source before, and what ends up happing is a scene is divided into a series of flat layers that are of set depending on the supposed depth of the scene. This, while interesting to look at, isn't very exciting.

    If it's not shot from a 3d camera, well, it's just not real 3d. There are a couple of companies out there pimping technology that relies on the difference in time it takes for lighter and darker shaded images to be interpreted by the brain, but these methods only work well on video with a good deal of horizontal movement. You can demonstrate this effect when you wear sunglasses and try to climb stairs. If you divide your field of vision between the lighter and darker areas and try to descend a set of stairs, the difference between when the and darker parts of the signal are interpreted can cause subtle but noticable vertigo.

    I can't wait for 3d tv, but I've got to doubt any technology that works from an existing 2d source. -dameron

  • 3D on tv?
    i can barely handle double Ds on tv.

    girls with 3D. how do they _walk_?

    no, seriously. it's amazing they got rid of the 9-camera system. i expect high-boobz0r-content-pr0n made for tv to become much more affordable in the coming years. i imagine that you'd need a new tv, like one with a 256:9 aspect just to fit those triple-Ds in any scene.
  • ..production is a lot more than 20% more expensive. Is it?

    No I didn't read the article. That's what you're here for.
  • Hmm...something that can look at a two dimensional picture and infer depth...

    That happens *every time* I look at the TV. What possible value is gained by this? We already perceive 3-dimensionality from a 2-d source through the normal cues (lighting, foreshortening, parallax etc.) and our brains do a good job of solving it, considering that it is an ill-posed problem requiring a domain of knowledge.

    Taking a 2-d image, making it into two images, one for each eye, won't do anything other than move the preliminary processing outside the head. I doubt that any computer can match the human visual system, either.

  • This is somewhat off-topic, but it comes to mind every time someone mentions "3D-TV" - especially a proposal like this, where the marketing message is basically "convert your film/videotape to 3D!"

    The problem, as I see it, is that we have developed a specific visual language for film over the last 100 years. Think of the last movie you saw, with its jump-cuts, zooms, pans whatever. Now think of the last 3D movie - or if not that, how holograms are used in Star Wars. The camera either doesn't move at all, or moves freely, like a flight sim. It doesn't jump around, and you tend to stay inside the same scene. While it's a very good point (as already mentioned) that 3D environments can cause simulator sickness (and not even those - my ex-wife used to get vertigo even watching long camera dolly shots in action films) think about how much more disorienting standard film techniques will be when applied to 3D movies.

    That implies to me that when 3D does actually work for mass entertainment as a replacement for film and television they will be both immersive (the holograms are around you, rather than stuck in a corner of your room) and considerably slower-paced than modern cinema.

  • Dude... It isn't as if people aren't wasting enough time in front of that damn tube. And now they're gonna make it 3d?!?!?!?! Why not just build a damn holodeck, like in Star Trek or whatever. Like that one episode, "Ship in a Bottle" (for those of you who don't remember, it's the one where the blind dude and Data ask the computer for a Sherlock Holmes mystery that would be a challenge for Data to solve. And the computer gave it to them. I would have just asked for a bottle of Negra Modelo, but they asked for a bottle with the whole friggen Startrek Enterprise inside.) And when Windows goes crazy, you'll think you're walking around your house, but you're still in the holodeck and weird shit is happening all around. That would be really friggen weird.
  • Anyone remember that Batman movie with the 3D TVs that allowed the riddler and two face to learn everybodies secrets?
  • The content is not worth it.

    And besides, there's no need for 3D since, with the problems of IP ownership, all we'll have to watch from now on are reruns. Its just changes of medium for the same content. They're making live-action movies of cartoons based on comic book characters and showing these on TV. No original thought is allowed to intrude.

    500 chanels, all showing YESTERDAY. The content as the matrix for the ads. Valenti's victory.

    That's a powerful disincentive for any change in the delivery medium.

    Think on that next time you're at the mall listening to music written before you were born being played, badly, over the PA system, paid for by the mall owners. (The MP3 format doesn't have enough audio quality? For this?)

    Ted Kazinski was wrong in what he did but right in his reasoning behind it. To paraphrase Tim Leary: "Turn off. Unplug. Drop out."
  • Digital TV has been broadcasting and available for over 2yrs. For (supposedly) little cost more than standard TV sets.

    HDTV supposely has been available too.

    So why is it I have known ppl to buy new TV sets, but nobody seems to have bought, nor wanted to buy, an HDTV set.

    Good luck trying to claim this will be mainstream in 5 yrs.
  • A few years ago you could buy 2hb in the shops around here, it had exactly the same effect. Things got 3d on the telly, no expensive hardware or whatever! They stopped selling it when the government declared it a drug. So now whenever we want to watch 3d fx on the telly we have to take the still legal mushrooms.
  • I get so frustrated of reading about cool new things like this that will really make it feel like we passed the year 2000. Most of the time it just gets hyped and then it fades away. Just think back to when you were small. We all thought that we will have flying cars and holographic tv's etc. Companies try so hard to come up with brilliant ideas but it's either too expensive or they get a slap on the wrist from someone else that claim it was their idea. The last cool thing that really made a difference was cellphones. At the moment the economy is still in a slump worldwide and everyone is just waiting for the next "big" thing . It might be 3G in Telecoms, or whatever, but I think something like this is a step in the right direction. If it works so well, why not throw our old 2D Tv's out the window and switch the whole world over to 3D TV? Especially with CPU power doubling every 18 months, I'm sure it would just be some time and a lot of sales (at competing prices) before everyone would get one. That would drive the price evern lower and open up new markets. I really hope this takes off.
  • takes existing 2D film and creates a "depth map" for each frame

    A depth-map isn't good enough for real 3D. When something is close, one eye sees things behind it which the other eye can't see. That's how stereographic 3D images work, and that's how your brain needs the data presented. Because of this, any manufactured depth perception based only on a depth-map will necessarily be a poor trade-off between depth and quality.

    The processing which would be required to present this "depth" data in a viewable form would be considerable as well.

    Since a depth-map is going to require just as many pixels (perhaps with a lesser bit-depth) as a full image, why not just transmet full stereoscopic images instead? They'd require only slightly more bandwidth and almost no additional processing, and they'd result in a real 3D image.

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