3-D TVs for Industry: $64B; Health Research: Zero
Plenty of money will be made selling stereo 3-D televisions over the next few years, according to two market research reports issued this week. Whether any of it funds research on the health impacts of broad use of such novel systems remains to be seen.
Market watcher Insight Media forecasts sales of 3-D TVs will soar more than ten-fold from about 3.4 million this year to 49.6 million by 2015, growing to more than 20 percent of all TV sets. Its competitor iSuppli Corp. was even more bullish, predicting sales of 78 million 3-D TV sets in 2015, creating a market it valued at $64.4 billion.
A handful of experts in human perception recently expressed concern because the TVs require consumers focus and compensate their perception in unnatural ways. Researchers in the U.S. and the U.K. are seeking grants to conduct studies of the possible effects of the technology.
Stereo 3-D graphics have been available in low volume systems for years. A push started by Hollywood movie makers in the last few years now is driving the technology into mainstream living rooms in pursuit of profits in sales of premium content and systems.
Consumer electronics companies spent the last two years sorting out standards, intellectual property and technology issues to settle on a mainstream path for stereo 3-D TVs and Blu-Ray Disc players. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January all the top consumer OEMs showed TVs and Blu-Ray players they said they will ship this year; broadcasters including ESPN and others said they will start stereo 3-D services this year.
Sears announced last week it is selling new 3-D TVs from Samsung for as little as $2,500. U.S. TV maker Vizio has announced a system for about $1,800.
"We expect to see stereo 3-D in flagship products with a modest premium of 20 percent or so over 2-D products," said Chris Chinnock, principal of Insight Media. "Like any new feature, we think the premium pretty much disappears in two to four years depending on the technology and the brand," he added.
For its part, iSuppli predicts average selling prices for 3-D TVs will plunge from $1,768 this year to $825 by 2015, fueling a rapid take off of the new category. "That sounds very aggressive to me," said Chinnock.
Both market watchers agree a lot of money will be made on 3-D TVs in the next few years by everyone from TV makers to broadcasters and content companies. TV makers have seen their revenues decline as selling prices erode faster than unit shipments grow.
3-D TVs "will help slow the decline in revenues so the market becomes flat or slightly up," said Chinnock.
The rise of 3-D TVs will parallel geographic and technology trends in the overall TV market. For example, by 2015 China is expected to purchase about 9.9 million 3-D TVs a year, nearly as many as will be sold in North America, according to Insight Media. In terms of technologies, LCD-TVs will dominate the 3-D TV market, becoming more than 40 million of the 50 million sets to ship in 2015, the company said.
Most of the remainder of the 2015 sales will be for plasma TVs which are seeing slight growth. "I think 3-D rejuvenates plasma to some extent, certainly Panasonic sees it that way," said Chinnock.
However, he expects Digital Light Projection TVs to be phased out of the market by 2015 or earlier. Mitsubishi is the only major TV maker still shipping sets using the technology, he said.
On the horizon, organic LED TVs should start hitting the market by about 2015, Insight Media projects. Demos of ultra-thin OLED TVs attracted much attention at the last two CES events.
"We don't know exactly when they will get in the market," said Chinnock. "Almost all the OLED TVs probably will be 3-D capable because they are fast and will be premium products--so why not make them 3-D," he said.
The rise of 3-D TVs will not be a slam dunk. Risk factors that could depress the ramp include whether consumers will adopt the necessary glasses and whether there will be enough high quality content available to spark consumer interest.
"The quality and quantity of content is probably the most important issue in my mind," said Chinnock. "If you only have three Blu-Ray discs that will get pretty boring, pretty quickly—and bad 3-D content could create a backlash," he said.
Indeed, experts in human perception have been coaching stereographers in Hollywood about how to avoid problems such as the convergence-accommodation effect that they have shown can cause eye strain and headaches. Researchers have yet to study the correlations between specific eye movements and symptoms of eye strain. Academics at Berkeley, the University of Southern California and the University of Wales are trying to find funding for such studies.
"There's hardly any data, so there's a need for vision scientists to map that out properly for different populations," said Simon Watt, a lecturer at the University of Wales. Watt estimates it could cost half a million dollars to conduct a three-year study of the issue.
"My goal is to develop a set of guidelines about the limits of stereo 3-D and where fatigue comes in," said Watt. "Ideally I'd like to know if the effects hold true for people throughout their life span," he said.
The brain is not wired to re-adjust perception of 3-D images in space, Watt said. Thus significant exposure to 3-D TVs could cause neurological re-wiring in the brains of children who use such sets for extended periods.
"Lots of aspects of visual development are still not fixed even by nine years old," Watt said.
If vendors spin out stereo 3-D computer games and PC applications any problems could become heightened because the perceptual issues are intensified as the distance to the screen becomes smaller, Watt said. In addition, "your ability to accommodate [for stereo 3-D images] significantly decreases with age," he said.
It would be very hard to do longitudinal studies of the impact of intense 3-D TV and PC exposure from both a practical and an ethical standpoint, Watt said. "In a sense the experiment will be done in people's living rooms if these things become widespread," he said.
"I don't think there's any compelling argument that if you look at this sort of content as a kid something terrible will happen, so I wouldn't be to alarmist about it—but the point is we don't know," said Watt. "There is, however, some small indication that if you have a diet of blurry images it can accentuate myopia, for example," he added.
Watt said he and other researchers want to sound "a note of caution, not an alarm bell" about 3-D TVs.
The good news is, "the industry does seem to want to know the answers to these questions, so I'm confident there's a will out there to do this work," he said.
By Rick Merritt, EE Times
