As the fervor grows, so does the vision: 3-D TV is 'not a feature but a platform'
Las Vegas - The consumer electronics industry is seeing its future through a pair of stereo 3-D glasses. The left eye sees an opportunity to revive sagging TV and media revenues. The right eye sees a set of unresolved technical issues.
The dichotomy made for a somewhat dizzying scene at the Consumer Electronics Show. As attendees crowded booths to watch adrenaline-pumping 3-D TV movies and sports, technologists packed panel sessions to sort through incompatible formats and unfinished standards.
One part of the picture that's already clear is the business rationale. TV unit shipments will rebound a modest 6 percent in 2010 after declining 1 percent in 2009, according to market watcher DisplaySearch (Austin). But the firm further estimates that TV set revenues were down 10 percent last year because of a 9 percent decline in global average selling prices-the first year of declining prices since the flat-panel transition began. Similarly, studios watched sales of movies on optical disks drop as much as 13 percent in 2009. Revenue from sales of content online is growing, but not nearly fast enough to make up for the losses.
Studio representatives led by DreamWorks Animation chief executive Jeffrey Katzenberg have been saying for two years that they want to bring their premium 3-D theatrical releases to the home as a way to bolster revenues. Somewhere on the road to CES 2010, the broadcasters and systems companies got on board. All of the major TV maker pledged at CES to ship 3-D TVs by June. They made 3-D TV demos the center of their huge show floor exhibits.
"Everyone is going at breakneck speed because we believe 3-D will rejuvenate the consumer electronics business," said Eisuke Tsuyuzaki, CTO of Panasonic North America. But Tsuyuzaki added a caveat: "We saw this CES as a watershed, so the first-generation products may have some issues."
As the momentum grows, so does the vision.
Tsuyuzaki asserted that 3-D TV is "not a feature but a platform. It's not only about consumer electronics but has applications in health care and engineering."
"There will be new kinds of experiences opened up" via 3-D," said Buzz Hays, a former stereographer at Disney (now part of Sony Pictures Imageworks). He explained what he meant by posing a question: "How many of us can afford, for example, a sideline ticket to the Super Bowl?"
Indeed, companies are already making plans for stereo 3-D consumer cameras and camcorders that will arrive "way earlier than five years from now," said Tsuyuzaki.
"The fact that YouTube can already support stereo 3-D makes it very interesting," said Nandhu Nandhakumar, senior vice president of advanced technology at LG Electronics. "I think the speed at which [3-D has taken off] has caught many people by surprise."
An online survey of about 2,000 U.S. adults, however, adds a cautionary note. About a third of the respondents said they had seen a 3-D movie in the past year, 80 percent of those said they had enjoyed it and a quarter of the total group said they would buy a 3-D TV within three years. However, they also said they would expect to pay $1,000 or less.
Although TV makers did not discuss pricing at CES, most 3-D TVs are expected to cost three times that or more. LG launched a 3-D TV in South Korea in August for $3,000. Toshiba's Cell TV could sell for $10,000 in the United States.
"They will be the Cadillacs of the display market," said Shawn DuBravac, director of research at the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), co-author of the study. The smallest 3-D TV set he saw on the CES show floor was a 46-inch model, DuBravac added.
'A living, breathing science project'
Whatever the reception, 3-D TV is coming. As a first step in providing content, the Blu-ray Disc Association finished a standard for high-def 3-D disks in mid-December so that disks can ship in tandem with the TVs. Katzenberg personally handed the first 3-D Blu-ray copy of "Monsters vs. Aliens" to the president of Samsung North America at one CES press conference.
Systems makers will ship a new generation of 3-D-enabled Blu-ray drives in tandem with the new TVs this year. The drives will sport their own format and the latest version of the HDMI interconnect: version 1.4, built with the bandwidth and signaling capabilities to handle 3-D content in full high def.
Other content and broadcasting companies, including British Sky Broadcasting (BskyB), DirecTv, Discovery Channel and ESPN, said they would turn on dedicated 3-D services in 2010.
"This is a living, breathing science project, but we are comfortable going ahead," said Chuck Pagano, executive vice president of technology at ESPN, which plans to launch multiple stereo 3-D channels starting in June with its broadcast of the FIFA World Cup from Johannesburg, South Africa.
The broadcasters, however, have yet to release details of what formats they will use, and they are expected to adopt differing approaches. That's setting up a last-minute crunch all along the supply chain for the first wave of products.
All 3-D broadcast signals are expected to be "frame compatible" with the current content coming into cable TV plants and set-tops, but all will require conversion.
Chip and system makers say they can handle that job with new firmware in existing silicon. But they will need three months and sample video to write and test their components before systems will be ready to ship.
Broadcasters' networks lack the bandwidth to support a full 1080-progressive image for both the left and right eye, so they cannot deliver the full high-definition video seen on today's top TVs. They have been testing a variety of formats to pack two images into one frame to see which yields the best results. Those formats include multiple ways of putting two images side by side, putting them over and under each other, using a checkerboard configuration or interleaving lines or columns.
"You can create so many permutations, it can be a mess," said David Broberg, the vice president of consumer video technology at CableLabs. "We have reduced it down to a preference for a single over/under format and are working with TV makers and content providers to settle on that, and so far results have been positive."
The over/under format is said to be royalty free. But satellite providers DirecTv and BskyB expect to use a side-by-side format. RealD, which provides 3-D technology for the lion's share of theaters, says it has a fundamental patent on side-by-side technology. RealD announced partnership deals at CES with virtually of all the top TV makers; the agreements were said to involve licenses for formats, glasses and other aspects of 3-D.
Announced licensees of RealD's format include DirecTv, JVC, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba.
"A number of top consumer companies have done due diligence on us and determined we have a patent" on the side-by-side method, said Josh Greer, president of RealD.
The lack of a patent pool is a weak spot in the business case for 3-D TV. "The patent trolls will come out; they always do with a new technology," said David Naranjo, director of product development for Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America.
RealD believes it has built enough momentum to sweep the market. "The industry can now see a thread-content, delivery and display-all using our 3-D technology," said Koji Hase, RealD's president of worldwide consumer electronics. RealD's technology is display agnostic and works either with polarized glasses or active shutter glasses, according to Hase. Most important, he said, "it's implementable in existing infrastructure."
The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) kicked off an effort in June to set a standard for 3-D distribution formats. Given the competitive issues, however, some believe the marketplace will set de facto standards.
Whatever format emerges, many observers said consumers may not even notice the resolution downgrade in 3-D broadcast content. Silicon and systems engineers said they may be able to use resolution enhancement to compensate.
Ultimately, broadcasters expect to expand their bandwidth and move to new codecs such as the MPEG-4 multiview codec (MVC) widely seen as the optimal solution for stereo 3-D. But such a migration will take several years and cost billions.
It would take twice the bandwidth of today's satellite set-top boxes to support 60 frames/second of 1080p content, said Brian Lenz, director of product design at BskyB. "You will not see that in next few years," he said.
But Broberg of CableLabs said many cable TV set-tops now support 1080p at 24 frames/s and that within two years, many could be upgraded to 60 frames/s.
Terrestrial broadcasters have the biggest hurdles because they have even less bandwidth to work with than satellite and cable companies. But the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), which manages the U.S. terrestrial standard, has given 3-D support a back seat as it tries to get its mobile broadcasting technology off the ground in the next two years.
"Optical media has the best scenario, then it's cable and satellite, and probably last is terrestrial, because the challenges just get harder for them," said Wendy Aylsworth, vice president of engineering for SMPTE and a chief technologist for Warner Brothers studios.
Getting fitted for glasses
Partly because of the multiple formats for optical disks and broadcasts, the first sets may require users to select the kind of 3-D content they want to watch.
"Someday sets will automatically detect stereo 3-D formats, but for today users still have to choose the right one from an on-screen menu," said Phil Lelyveld, a 3-D program manager at the Entertainment Technology Center, a branch of the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts.
"That's not something you want in the consumer marketplace," he said, adding that USC is showing TV makers technology it has developed to automate the process.
Likewise, CableLabs has found a way to take the 3-D control codes from HDMI 1.4 and make them available to the many HDMI 1.2 and 1.3 set-tops now in consumers' homes. The group also helped convince HDMI Licensing LLC to relax its specs, in part to allow for the workaround.
CableLabs is calling for TV makers to take part in interoperability tests in its 3-D labs to make sure the first systems work smoothly. "HDMI is very powerful, but it has so many options that if people don't implement them in the same way it won't work well," Broberg said.
Like the broadcasters, TV makers are adopting different display and glasses technologies to show stereo 3-D. Thus, for example, glasses used on a Toshiba set may not work for a Samsung TV. Vendors such as Panasonic will brand their glasses for the first-generation products to avoid confusion and flaunt their proprietary technologies.
All the top vendors at CES showed prototype systems using active shutter glasses, which are said to be the best solution for rendering a full 1080p signal for both eyes. The cheaper, passive polarized glasses used in theaters only deliver 540 horizontal pixels per frame, although some TV makers may use them for lower-cost sets or for use in public places like sports bars.
"We have to deliver [source video] to both types of glasses, and we want to treat each equally and fairly," said Broberg of CableLabs. "There are advantages to each."
It's not clear which display technologies TV makers are using or where they're getting them. But the vast majority of active shutter glasses at CES carried the RealD logo.
Glasses will be required at least for the next decade. Researchers say it could require displays with four times today's resolution to deliver high-def stereo 3-D, without artifacts, that can be seen by the naked eye. And according to content producers, capturing video that can be seen in 3-D without glasses will require at least eight lenses per camera, and possibly dozens.
Technicolor showed a demo of so-called auto-stereoscopic 3-D TV at CES using its interpolation algorithm. But the approach had a relatively narrow viewing area, of 10, so users saw blurring when they moved their heads. "It could require 8k-resolution screens to do it well, so [auto-stereoscopic TV] could be 10 to 15 years away," said Technicolor researcher Thierry Borel.
The good news is that users in the CEA survey showed a tolerance for 3-D glasses. About a third said they considered the glasses annoying before they saw a 3-D movie, but afterward only 20 percent said the glasses had been a nuisance.
Interfaces and conversion
Standards groups are playing catch-up with the industry on 3-D. The CEA has started an effort to define a standard for the infrared signaling to active shutter glasses, but the spec is not expected to be finished until after first products ship. Greer of RealD said his company is not participating in the effort.
In Europe, a Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB) group that will set market requirements for the technology held its first meeting late last month. David Daniels, a senior technologist at BskyB, said a parallel group looking into technical requirements is also just getting started. It is expected to explore several areas, including formats for source video, signaling over HDMI and codecs such as MVC.
"We're still in the early days of understanding how H.264 works," he said, noting the BBC recently reported it had achieved a new low bit-rate capability with MPEG-4.
The DVB will also take up the issue of how to show graphics and subtitles in the stereo 3-D space. "If you want to check out how a 3-D TV vendor handles 2-D graphics, just hit the menu button on one of their demos," said Hays of Sony. "Some people treat it very elegantly, and others make your head explode."
Some companies see the lack of good 2- and 3-D interfaces as an opportunity. A representative of Motorola's set-top group said it had developed proprietary technology for the subtitle problem and would supply it to its customers. Stereo 3-D camera company 3ality Digital Systems (Burbank, Calif.) said it was working with a startup on 3-D navigation software.
Another area ripe for technology development is real-time 2- to 3-D conversion (see story, page 28). Toshiba and Samsung promised to offer the capability as a differentiating feature on their TVs in the initial years, when there will be limited 3-D content available. Both companies claim they have unique algorithms running on the proprietary, muscular processors they are putting in their systems.
Toshiba, which is using its version of the eight-core Cell CPU co-developed with IBM, cautioned that the conversion will offer a limited version of stereo 3-D that will provide some depth behind the screen but none in front of it.
Studio stereographers and competing TV makers panned the techniques.
"We considered 2-D to 3-D conversion, but once you watch real 3-D content it's easy to see where the converted video breaks up, so we decided to stick with content produced in 3-D," said Nandhakumar of LG.
"I've never seen a good version of it," said DreamWorks stereographer Phil McNally. "It's a question of whether there is any information available for a computer to understand what's in front or behind in a scene."
Steve Schklair, chief executive of 3ality, which is carving out a business in stereo 3-D capture, said the technique was tried in a football game in Dallas where the converted video was put up on a stadium monitor. "It was booed off the screen in three minutes," he said.
"It does require the hands of an artist to do this," said Hays of Sony. "I know everyone is trying to jump on the 3-D bandwagon, but some people will fall off."
Studio and broadcasters have their own artistic challenges with stereo 3-D. "When you open your eyes in the morning you see in 3-D. But in our world, cuts, dissolves and close-ups don't exist, so we need a language to handle them," said Hays, noting that directors including Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson are learning stereo 3-D techniques.
Habib Zargarpour, a senior art director at Electronic Arts, said he is working on a stereo 3-D version of its Need for Speed game. Chip maker Nvidia showed an automatically converted version of the game at a Siggraph conference three years ago, but the demo exposed some embarrassing flaws in the software's 3-D logic, he said.
"We do a lot of cheats, and all of a sudden there we were, caught with our pants down," he said.
Ted Kenney, a stereographer at 3ality, said stereo 3-D content production needs to be kept simple. "There are 27 cameras for a routine NFL game to create energy, but 3-D lets the energy happen in a frame, so I think we need to slow down the cuts," Kenney said. "Living with one 3-D camera for 60 seconds, you get more information [than you get with multiple pans and cuts in 2-D], so I've talked about shooting a game from one seat for an entire quarter."
"There is a whole new generation of cinematographers coming up, learning about stereography from scratch," said Lelyveld of ETC. "Someday this will be a field just like cinematography is today."
Overview of 3-D image recording technologies
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Source: Nomura
Combinations of 3-D image recording and display technologies
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Source: Nomura
Global 3D-capable televison unit sales
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Source: Insight Media
Junko Yoshida contributed to this report.
www.eetimes.com
See related article on page 28.