IBC 2008 Review: Walking the Floor

Nagoya University showed free-viewpoint TV, which allows you to "move the camera" even after a scene has been shot, but you need to shoot the scene with 100 cameras to begin with. It's making its way through standardization committees. They also had a 3D capture and display system using what looked a lot like 19th-century zoetrope technology.

Softel was already announcing stereoscopic subtitles(!), and they weren't the only subtitling company thinking about them. Similarly, SysMedia had voice-recognition subtitling, something that Ninsight offered, too.

Binocle 3D is a French company that deals only with stereoscopic TV.

Sony has a technology demonstration of 3D on a 42-inch LCD monitor. It is SUPERB! They are using alternate frames for the two eyes.

The no-glasses-needed Philips stereoscopic displays were all over the show, in sizes ranging from 8- up to 56-inch, not counting a wall made up of multiple displays. It offered a 3D effect, though not as great as Sony's (the latter requiring glasses).

Vuzix iWear showed tiny-LCD glasses that made viewers think they were watching much larger displays, something research they provided said would make mobile-TV viewers want to watch for longer periods (they can offer stereoscopic images, too).

WIGE Media has joined forces with MikroM and 3ality to demo a 3D wireless production bundle which combines WIGE's CUNIMA MCU camera, MikroM's Megacine field recorder and a 3ality camera rig. The set-up, which resembles Walt Disney's Wall-E, also delivers a 2D stream - you just choose a left or right 'eye' - and so can be used for regular broadcast applications. WIGE initially developed the CUNIMA MCU for coverage of the German Touring Car Championship. The plug and play native HD camera is capable of withstanding high G-force and the shock of impact.

On2 said its VP8 codec wass twice as efficient as MPEG-4 AVC.

DVB-T2 is, depending on parameters, 50 percent more efficient than DVB-T (and, to the digital transmission alphabel soup, IBC this year also added TMMB and AT-DMB).

NXP's very large booth consisted of a reception desk, a large wall, and a single flat-panel display showing 120 images per second.

By Mark Schubin, Television Broadcast