MUMBAI: Visitors at this year's ongoing consumer electronics event IFA in Berlin which concludes on 7 September 2005 will for the first time ever be able to experience live
content streamed in a glasses-free, three-dimensional television format.
Television technology firm Newsight GmbH which was formally Opticality/X3D Technologies has together with companies Grundig and 3D Image Processing (3D IP) succeeded in capturing live video and streaming it through an autostereoscopic 3D display system in real time.
In the past 3D content had been limited to post-production material. Newsight chairman and CEO Jay Bingle says, "This breakthrough will revolutionise home entertainment. We are leading the way to a new era in television - comparable to the passage from black-and-white to colour TV." Historically the IFA has always been the preferred platform to introduce
milestones in the development of television to a broad public: in 1967 the first colour TV, in 1983 the first stereo colour TV. And now in 2005 the
transition to live 3D TV without glasses.
To date, 3D content has had to go through a post-production process where it was specifically rendered for viewing without glasses. With this new breakthrough subject matter can now be captured and transmitted in glasses-free 3D in real time. This eventually introduces an entirely new way to experience everything from sporting events to reality TV. Projected timing for the in-home experience is seen within the next few years given infrastructure and other requirements. As a first milestone, the plan is to broadcast a live sporting event in 3D during next year's football World Cup.
The innovation is based on the ability to capture 3D with a single stereo-camera 1920x1080 (HDTV) in combination with a real-time
processing operation. In the past, such 3D content was typically captured with eight or sometimes two cameras, and then it was processed for delayed off-line playback.
With this new advancement, a scene is captured live in two perspectives using a professional high-resolution stereo camera with special image processing hardware code-named Black Betty, developed by partner company 3D-IP. These two data streams are then routed through a converter chip, which synthesises multiple viewpoints from a 3D scene in real time. A total of eight stereo views are generated, combined and then played back on a modified Grundig Tharus 3D TV screen.
The Tharus, a standard flat panel TV, is converted into a 3D display by
integrating a filter, specially developed by Newsight, into the TV set. Eight pictures are shown simultaneously and projected in different directions, so that the eye of the observer perceives each of the different perspectives.
