CEA Will Set Specs for 3-D Glasses
The Consumer Electronics Association plans to set standards for stereo 3-D glasses. The move is one of many efforts aimed at paving the road to interoperable 3DTV products for the digital home, a concept some see as the next big thing in television.
"Almost every stereo 3-D device comes with its own set of glasses and almost none of them are compatible," said Chris Chinnock, president of Insight Media, a market research company focused on display technology.
The 3D@Home industry group will draft a list of existing 3-D glasses and their attributes to help the CEA identify compatibility issues. It will also draft a document on user requirements for 3-D glasses, said Chinnock who sits on the board of the year-old group which now has 40 members.
The CEA aims to set separate standards for active and passive glasses. It has scheduled a May 12 meeting to take up the issue. Last fall, the CEA started exploring standards for 3DTV and kicked off an effort to update for stereo 3-D the CEA 861 standard that defines an uncompressed video interconnect at the heart of HDMI.
"They are trying to move things along as quickly as possible," said Chinnock.
Standards for glasses are just one small piece of the puzzle needed to deliver interoperable 3DTVs. The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers said earlier this year it will kick off in June an effort to set standards for a master file for stereo 3-D content.
For its part, the 3D@Home group is working on document that will map out the many different technical approaches to rendering stereo 3-D content on consumer systems. It will also draft a list describing the various encoding techniques used to compress stereo 3-D content.
"We're asking standards bodies and industry groups what they need," said Chinnock. "There are a lot of moving parts here."
Interest in stereo 3-D continues to rise, led by Hollywood studios who are finding success selling premium tickets for 3-D movies at theaters. For example, the Dreamworks animated 3-D feature Monsters vs. Aliens earned more than $318 million in its first 32 days, according to one Web site.
Consumer electronics companies are keen to find a next-big-thing beyond today's big screen digital LCD TVs and think stereo 3-D could be it. A Panasonic chief technology officer called for a 3DTV standard this year at the CES show in January.
The drumbeat on 3DTV is continuing at industry events. As many as 53 sessions addressed aspects of 3-D at the recent National Association of Broadcasters annual conference. A high profile 3DTV panel is planned at next week's Digital Hollywood event in Santa Monica, Calif.
"The big take away for me was the level of activity in 3-D at NAB," said Chinnock. "Almost everyone has a product or program, and everyone in the whole NAB infrastructure chain is engaged in it — that's a sea change from last year," he said.
Plenty of roadblocks are still ahead. They range from efforts to set standards for rendering content in the home to how the content is created at the studio.
"The average engineer going to the NAB show realized there were twice as many issues that they thought going in," said Richard Doherty, principal of consulting firm Envisioneering. "You do 3-D wrong and you don't just give people headaches, you make them sick," he said.
Delivering good 3-D content in the cinema requires careful attention to a variety of issues in human perception. Translating that content to a 47-inch home TV has its own set of complex issues, Doherty said
"A lot of [OEMs] were saying, 'cripes this is more complex that we thought,'" he said. "That was the great awakening that came out of this show.
"It's easy to create 3-D, but it's hard to create good 3-D," said Chinnock, a fact he said movie producers made clear in NAB sessions. "So called pros were putting up stuff that hurt my eyes," he said.
"There will be a lot of subpar material that comes out, and it could give the sector another black eye," Chinnock said referring to the fast rise and fall of anaglyph 3-D movies in the 1950's.
"There is a handful of stereographers that know what they are doing," he added.
The 3D@Home group will put together a primer on creating good stereo 3-D based on interviews with some of the top filmmakers, he added.
By Rick Merritt, EE Times
