Are You Ready for a 3D Mobile Phone?
If the answer is, not quite, you’re in luck: they’re not quite ready.
But that doesn’t mean that you won’t soon be consuming 3D content on your mobile phone. So says, Chris Yewdall, president/CEO of Digital Dynamic Depth (DDD), whose 3D chips will be embedded in next-generation 3D-enabled TV sets from Samsung and a range of 3D PC desktop monitors from Hyundai.
Right now, the wrinkles still haven’t been ironed out to create momentum for the 3D experience in the home theatre. But we’re not too far from that reality, says Yewdall as well as many other 3D experts. SMPTE (the Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers), which brought the industry together to create a single Digital Cinema standard, is already engaged in similar work related to 3D TV.
When it comes to improvements in functionality for the mobile phone, Yewdall is a believer in the trickle-down theory.
“The mobile phone market is an adjunct to [Digital Cinema],” he explains. “Cinema is driving content into home consumer market, initially on TVs. But devices like PCs and mobile phones have to try to keep current to deliver a competitive experience to what people are getting on their TV screens.”
If you live in Japan or Korea–or are just following the mobile news there–you know that Sharp launched a 3D mobile phone on NTT Docomo in Japan in 2003 and Korea’s SK Telecom launched a 3D phone (from Samsung) a year ago, in July 2007. Yewdall reports that DDD licensed to Samsung for that application, which was capable of turning any number of 12 TV channels into 3D on the handset, on the fly. The Samsung mobile phone was indeed 3D without glasses. “There’s an extra layer of optical technology that is manufactured into the display screen,” he says. “It can be switched on and off electronically. When it’s switched off, you see 2D. When it’s switched on, the software reformats the images and you see 3D.”
Mobile phones have another, intrinsic benefit. Rather than the multi-viewing of TV, where many viewers are jostling for the “sweet spot” where 3D’s two images converge, the mobile phone generally involves a single viewer. “So you can’t have three or four people gathered around the phone,” Yewdall says.”3D imagery works very, very well-–if you’re dealing with one viewer. The sweet spot is pretty forgiving on high-res mobile displays.”
So, back to the adventures of 3D mobile phones in Japan and Korea: What happened? “The big challenge is there wasn’t enough content, and no automatic 3D conversion [from 2D to 3D],” he says. “It was very popular with consumers, but didn’t drive data revenues for Docomo.
Ah yes, the challenge of actually monetizing something as potentially cool as 3D on the mobile phone. If we’re still embroiled in figuring out ways to monetize 2D content, is 3D realistic?
Yewdall’s answer is simple. U.S. consumers will soon have not only 3D-enabled TV sets but 3D content. The next year will see the release of nearly a dozen 3D films, including James Cameron’s Avatar and offerings from Disney and DreamWorks. Those studios will want to market those 3D films...in 3D, whether it’s a display in a movie theatre lobby or, say, a mobile phone.
“The most enlightened scenario is with what Samsung and Mitsubishi are doing with TVs, that mobile carriers will want to add mobile to keep it relevant and competitive,” says Yewdall. “I see that as the key driver.”
“There’s a real possibility of 3D in the next generation of mobile phones, driven by 3D displays and more powerful processors,” he adds. “The key here is that some of the more sophisticated high-res displays combined with 3D optics gives a higher quality image and larger sweet spot.”
The “wow” factor will also be appealing to carriers and handset manufacturers, he says. “This is a way to deliver that experience, cost effectively,without glasses. The interesting thing is that the application doesn’t have to be very sophisticated to get that wow factor. It can just be wallpaper jumping off the screen 3 or 4 inches.”
By Debra Kaufman, MobilizedTV
