Elecard & Triaxes Start 3D Video Project Development
Triaxes was founded in 2004 and works in 3D-visualization area. Main product of Triaxes is 3DMasterKit Creative Studio - software package for creating stereo and flip pictures using lenticular technology.
Using Triaxes 3DMasterKit application one can create 3D-photo out of two or more frames (sequence of pictures of the same scene shot from slightly different position). The multi-frame 3D sequence is used for making auto-stereoscopic lenticular photos for viewing without glasses.
Using Triaxes StereoTracer application one can generate set of multi-aspect frames out of just one original picture. StereoTracer uses grayscale helper image named depth-map or disparity map; bright areas of depth-map show foreground objects in original picture, dark areas - background.
New feature of StereoTracer 3.5 (will be released at the end of September 2008) is depth-map generation wizard: one can easily create depth-map out of stereo pair. Based on a pair of photos StereoTracer algorithm automatically generates depth-map:
Then the original image and depth-map are used for rendering the multi-view sequence of frames for auto-stereoscopic visualization.
Triaxes & Elecard are going to use algorithm of creating depth-map out of stereo pair in 3D-video project. A lot of cinema studios captured movies in 3D-video format as stereo pair (for each frame we store 2 images, which show the same scene from different aspects).
We believe that so-called 2D+Z format (original frame + depth map) has the following advantages:
- Backward compatibility
2D+Z video can be easily used to play generic flat video (just ignore Z-frame).
- High compression
One true-color original image + grayscale depth-map require less space and can be compressed better than two true-color frames of stereo pair.
- Flexibility
Using depth-map one can generate as many frames as it is required by certain visualization device (two frames for viewing through anaglyph or polarization glasses, or many in-between frames for lenticular 3D monitors like Phillips WOWvx). Moreover, we can generate multi-aspect frames using different parallax to fit size of monitor and distance to viewer.
- Hardware support
Phillips WOWvx 3D-monitor supports 2D+Z format.
3D video project includes following items:
- 3D-video codecs based on MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 (AVC) standards.
We plan to modify Elecard codecs in order to handle with additional 3D data. Also 3D video player will be developed.
- 3D-video converter.
We plan to use the developed algorithms in software for conversion generic flat movies (2D) into 3D and 2D+Z formats of stereoscopic visualization.
- IPTV services for 3D-video.
We plan to integrate of the 3D video content with IPTV system, VOD servers and players developed by Elecard. Elecard provides a firmware solution SIGMA iTV for IPTV. Solution comprises CodecWorks AVC/H.264, XStreamer DVB-IP streamers and IP-DVB incapsulators, V-Cinema VoD and TimeShift servers as well as a line of iTelec STB set-top boxes. More detailed info can be found here.
We are ready for cooperation with hardware vendors and software developers. Also we are open to funding this project. If you have any questions or would like to cooperate with us, feel free to e-mail here.
