Home 3D Coming of Age

In case you missed it last week, the 3D@Home Consortium signed a memorandum of understanding with the Korea-based 3D Fusion Industry Consortium (3DFIC) to "facilitate the development of global standards that will lead to the successful commercialization of 3-D home-entertainment products and content, including HDTVs, set-top boxes, optical disc players, movies, games and television programs." The statement also said the two groups will share research and information to encourage the development and validation of device test and measurement procedures, and principles and guidelines for interoperability.

Beyond fostering the development of home CE devices the joint collaboration will also work towards developing 3D content creation standards and content authoring processes. Rick Dean, chairman of the 3D@Home Consortium said "Both the 3D@Home Consortium and 3DFIC share a common goal of ensuring 3D is successfully introduced and embraced by content creation community and consumers around the globe."

And the global scope referred to by Dean is not just US and Korea as the US signing event in Washington DC comes on the heels of the much larger "Shenzhen 3D Declaration" where four Asian 3D organizations (including Korea’s 3DFIC) signed an agreement to collaborate on R&D at the 2009 China International 3D World Forum in April. The outcome of this event was agreement among the Asian parties to jointly host the International 3D Fair 2009 at Ilsan, South Korea, in October 2009 under the banner of the "World 3D Consortium" sans any US participation.

On the 3D standards side, committee’s are already forming within the 3D World Forum. For example, we recently reported that both Kopin HK and Shenzhen Estar Displaytech formed the first working group under the Technology and Standard Professional Committee to develop 3D eyewear displays. According to Insight Media analyst Arthur Berman, "Other working groups under consideration include: 3D Display Measurement Standards, 3D Video Coding Standards and Human Factor and Healthy Guidelines for 3D Content."

By Steve Sechrist, DisplayDaily