SMPTE to Kick Off 3DTV Effort in June
Stereoscopic 3-D content is taking a small step closer to the home TV. The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers said it will define a single mastering standard for viewing on TVs, PCs and mobile phones stereo 3-D content that could come from optical disks, broadcast networks or the Internet.
Responding to a task force report released Monday (April 13), a SMPTE executive said the group will kick off a standards effort this summer with the aim of finishing the specs within a year. Other organizations including the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) are working on their own 3DTV standards in parallel with the SMPTE effort.
"It's probably somewhere around 2012 that there will be an interoperable standard available in consumer systems to handle all the delivery mechanisms for 3DTV," said Wendy Aylsworth, vice president of engineering for SMPTE and a chief technologist for Warner Brothers studios.
In its report, the SMPTE task force, launched in August, called for the group to define a so-called 3D Home Master. Studios or game publishers would deliver the master as source material for uses ranging from DVD and Blu-ray disks to terrestrial and satellite broadcasts and Internet downloadable or streaming files.
The 3D master will essentially define "high-level image formatting requirements that could impact 3DTV designs," said Aylsworth. "There may be some key items here that will affect hardware designs, but the larger bulk of [the 3DTV standards for hardware] probably will come from other organizations such as CEA," she added.
In late October, the Consumer Electronics Association said it started efforts to define 3DTV standards, beginning with an upgrade of the HDMI spec for carrying left and right eye images.
The SMPTE task force recommended a mastering standard based on 1920x1080 pixel resolution at 60 frames/second/eye. It said the spec should support an option for falling back to a 2-D image. It also said the standard should support hybrid products, such as Blu-ray disks that can support either 2D or stereo 3-D displays.
Extensibility will be key because stereo 3-D technology is still evolving, the group noted. Current displays "are essentially based on 2D display methods with some technology extensions to allow them to render two views (one for each eye) temporally or spatially interleaved. It seems reasonable to expect that future displays will be based on completely different technologies and principles," the report said.
The standard should also anticipate future distribution networks that offer greater bandwidth as well as the need to support more narrowband nets. The group said it is not clear how the standard should address the problem of data loss over a network or whether the spec should support a way to restrict content changes by some display devices.
Although many questions remain unanswered, Aylsworth took an upbeat tone on the task force report. "My hope is we can get something to the market soon and then we can improve it later," she said.
In a sign of the broad interest in 3DTV, more than 200 people from more than 90 companies participated in the task force. They included chip makers such as National Semiconductor and Texas Instruments, TV and broadcast manufacturers including Panasonic and Sony and studios such as Disney and Warner Brothers. Indeed, several TV makers gave demos of stereo 3-D sets at CES in January, and Panasonic called for the industry to set a 3DTV standard this year.
The SMPTE task force "was a good exercise in coalescing viewpoints on what this world could reasonably look like within a few years," she said. "It helped bring everyone on to a common page of what's reasonable to get this off the ground in a few years."
The report will be distributed for a nominal fee at the NAB conference next week and will be posted on the SMPTE Web site soon.
By Rick Merritt, EE Times
