Can Hollywood bring 3DTV home?

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Rick Merritt (09/22/2008 12:01 AM EDT) URL: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=210500115
Stereoscopic 3-D television could be the next home entertainment blockbuster, the logical sequel to today's high-definition flat-screen TVs. But the path to 3DTV winds through more twists and turns than the road to the Emerald City, passing through forests of alternative file formats, compression schemes, display technologies and patents. Market analyst firm Insight Media (Norwalk, Conn.) tracked as many as 22 unique approaches to displays alone in a seminal report on 3DTV published in May, and it's still early. No one has yet figured out a low-cost way to deliver stereo 3-D to LCDs. What's more, many consumer electronics giants, as well as key technology providers of digital cinema, have yet to announce their products and directions for 3DTV. Others say any approach that necessitates glasses--a requirement for high-resolution 3-D images today--will never be more than a niche with consumers at home. Nevertheless, the hunt for a mainstream standard is on, driven largely by rising interest from Hollywood. At least four major industry groups have formed this year to plow a route forward. "You are seeing a lot of overlapping activity here because everyone sees this problem," said Chris Chinnock, president of Insight Media, who helped found the 3D@Home Consortium, an ad hoc industry group. "3-D pictures are showing good returns at the box office and as a result, studios want to put these movies into the home market," said Wendy Aylsworth, senior vice president of technical operations at Warner Brothers. Aylsworth is also vice president of engineering for the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), one of Hollywood's top tech groups. In July SMPTE called for anyone interested to join a task force to investigate the possibility of defining a mastering standard for 3DTV content that could be carried over broadcast, cable, satellite, packaged disks or the Internet. More than 160 people from 80 companies signed up for the first meeting of the SMPTE task force, held under nondisclosure Aug. 19 in Los Angeles. The group is expected to submit a report to SMPTE leaders within six months. A follow-on effort to draft a standard for 3-D content formats could take another 18 to 30 months, Aylsworth said. Andy Setos, president of engineering at Fox Group, said he is not sure SMPTE is the right group for the job because of its historical focus on production issues. "We haven't identified the best forum for where this work can be done yet, and there could be an opening for a new forum," Setos said. One alternative, the 3D@Home Consortium, which counts Disney, Philips, Samsung and Sony among its 30 members, aims to draft needs and requirements statements for 3DTV. "We hope to do a lot of the legwork for people like SMPTE," Insight Media's Chinnock said. Separately, the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at the University of Southern California (USC), which hosted SMPTE's August meeting, has formed its own 3-D working group chaired by a representative from Dolby Labs. It aims to define the core issues involved in driving 3-D content into the home. The work at the USC lab complements that of SMPTE's new task force, said David Wertheimer, executive director of ETC, which was the official test site for the digital cinema standard set in 2005. The USC lab, founded in 1993 by "Star Wars" director George Lucas, has backing from a number of Hollywood studios as well as a handful of technology companies. Separately, ETC is asking vendors to install their 3DTV systems in its content lab "so [studios] can have a place in Los Angeles where they can bring their to-be-released content to view it using existing and emerging 3-D displays, formats and technologies," said Wertheimer. Europe hosts two government-funded 3DTV groups. The 3-D4YOU program aims to define capture, coding and format specifications for 3DTV. Launched in February, it includes the BBC, France Telecom, Philips and Thomson. The OSIRIS Project (Osiris stands for Original System for Image Rendition via Innovative Screens), has gathered nine companies including Barco and Thomson to explore 2-D and 3-D projection technologies in a nearly $19-million program slated to end in December 2009. The Blu-ray Disc Association is quietly working on its position on stereo 3-D but has yet to make a public statement. Blu-ray disks could be the first way stereo 3-D content is delivered to the home, because broadcast methods generally lack the bandwidth required to send separate high-resolution images for left and right eyes. Whoever sets the content standard, it must be backward compatible with today's 2-D capture, production and display systems, said Fox's Setos. "We want to send one stream of bits and have it decimated for either 2-D or 3-D viewing, just as we are moving to sending out only high-def video and letting terminals derive standard definition video from it." Beyond the content work, systems makers need to set standards for reading the formats and displaying the content on various kinds of TVs and devices. The Consumer Electronics Association has called a meeting in Las Vegas Oct. 22 to determine whether it's time for members to set a 3DTV standard that could cover TVs, set-tops and Blu-ray players. "I expect just about everybody who makes TVs, as well as some broadcasters, chip-set vendors and 3-D technology providers, will be there," said Brian Markwalter, vice president of technology and standards at CEA. "We want to see if this is the right time to create a standard or not, and there are arguments on both sides." Fox's Setos cautioned against display standards at a time when new technologies such as OLEDs are still emerging. "We don't want to preclude any display innovations," he said. Optimists say industry standards could emerge in less than three years, others fear it could take as long as a quarter-century--the time it took to move HDTV from concept to the shelves at Best Buy and other retailers. "My big concern is about deploying something prematurely and having it fail--that's the big danger," said Setos. "It's a dicey game the outcome of which I can't predict, but we're putting a lot of energy behind it." "The studios are calling the shots and doing a lot of subjective and objective testing in their labs," said Nicholas Routhier, chief executive of Sensio Technologies (Montreal), one of many relatively small companies promoting a unique 3-D technology. "The studios made the key decisions on DVD, Blu-ray and digital cinema" and it will be the same with 3DTV, he said. With the rise of 3-D movies commanding higher ticket prices at theaters "there is a lot of pressure building internally on the studios" to define 3DTV, said Ethan Schur, director of product marketing for TDVision Systems (Naperville, Ill.), another contender to provide the underlying technology. "A year or so ago studios weren't that interested in the home market at all, but now these people have turned around." Indeed, Insight Media has compiled a list of more than 80 3-D movies recently released or in the works--including 3-D versions of the "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings" series. Hollywood sees a lot of money being left on the table for premium home video versions of these films. Animation studios such as Dreamworks and Pixar have said within less than a year all their new releases will include 3-D versions. "They are already working with 3-D databases, so it's relatively easy to render a stereoscopic version," said Insight Media's Chinnock. At the Intel Developer Forum in August, Dreamworks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg said stereo 3-D marks a third era in entertainment technology, following the shifts to talkies and color. Top Hollywood directors including Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson are working on live-action movies in stereo 3-D. "In the next few years they will make some of the best films using these new techniques," Katzenberg said. 3-D live-action features such as "Journey to the Center of the Earth" and concerts from U2 and Hannah Montana point to other possibilities. "Eventually you will be able to watch the Yankees vs. the Red Sox live in 3-D at your local theater," said Chinnock. About 2,000 of an estimated 100,000 theaters worldwide can show 3-D content today using technology mainly from companies such as Real D Cinema (Beverly Hills, Calif.) and Dolby Labs. Both companies are expected to launch 3DTV products for the home, but neither has made any announcement yet and both declined to be interviewed for this story. In January, Real D hired Koji Hase, winner of a technical Emmy in 1999 for his work as chair of the DVD Forum, which helped establish the DVD format, to be president of worldwide consumer electronics, charged with helping to launch a home products business for the company. "What's happened in digital cinema will have an impact on the home, so Real D will have an edge," said Richard Doherty, principal of The Envisioneering Group (Seaford, N.Y.), a technology consulting firm. To date most big consumer electronics firms have stayed mum on the topic of 3DTV. "I think they see this as the next wave beyond HDTV, so it's strategic and they have stuff in the labs, but they want to keep quiet about it," said Chinnock. "There is an attitude of wait-and-see; people are cautious," said Sensio's Routhier, who has delivered development kits for the company's technology to eight TV makers. Mitsubishi and Samsung have released early 3DTV sets working with technology providers such as DDD Group (Santa Monica, Calif.). They generally use an interlacing algorithm called "smooth picture," applicable to their DLP- and plasma-based sets. But smooth picture uses a checkerboard pattern of pixels that cannot readily be compressed and sometimes requires extra hardware. More proprietary experiments are on the way, potentially pushing 3DTV sales from less than 300,000 in 2007 to 28 million by 2012, according to Insight Media. Plasma sets using smooth picture will represent most initial efforts, but once low-cost LCD methods are hammered out they should dominate long term. With so many players, it's unclear who holds the key intellectual property for 3DTV. But if the technology becomes as pervasive as many predict, those patents will someday be a gold mine.