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Immersive HDTV
grape jelly writes: "The Electronic Times has a story on a German company developing a system called Interactive Virtual View Video (IVVV). The idea is to send a number of HDTV feeds to a set-top box which will be merged to provide a headset-wearing user the ability to change his/her viewing angle or even move around within the image."
but it sure beaks smellovision.
--- Sigs are dumb.
Not to smack on such products, I can see the technological merit, the gimmick, and a few other things, but how would this enhance the television viewing experience?
I can hardly imagine walking around on stage during romeo and juliet and enjoying the experience any more than I already do.
hehehehe... all I have to say is "porn"...
Immersive HDTV Porn will solve all of the worlds problems!
Who thinks that expecting people to wear anything 'head mounted' to entertain themselves for more than 5 minutes at a time is a little unrealistic?
;p
I remember a completely failed 3d system from Nintendo, and even those super-cool digital goggles you can still find at Best Buy don't seem to have sold more than two pairs nationwide.
Now, what we really need is a nice immersive 3d ROOM that doesn't involve filling the space with fog. Piece of cake.
It takes too many resources. Broadcasters already don't want to convert to HDTV because they want to broadcast more channels, not higher quality. History tells us that this will not work out. It is a chicken and egg problem before there is even HDTV. An interesting technology demostration, but it just won't work for the mainstream. Hopefully they are looking for alternative avenues, maybe even next-gen (after gamecube) video games?
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
And to think the postercomment compression filter was written in a single day, using nothing more than 2 example posts and a half page of Perl. Wow.
They really need to start sending out the Pamela/Tommy video over HDTV so that I can immerse myself in that ;-)
I've never really been comfortable wearing headgear. the weight gets to be annoying, or the mechanism used to hold it on gets in the way when you just want to chill and lounge. now...if they ever actually get those sunglasses size/weight/look working, then we might have a massmarketable product here. coolsville: always 30-100 years in the future. we're never satisfied.
This will make virtual participative pornography worthwhile. The 2-d aspects of pornography limit its utility for people who want something more realistic.
Of course, this will also enable more accurate virtual depictions of terrains which are susceptible to terrorist attack, so perhaps the NSA should ban it or bug it?
Goat sex free since 2001
It's called a "set-top box" because it's a box most people set on top of their television.
hasn't this already been posted once? 2 reposts in the same day? you guys are slipping
Ever noticed that some movies suck?
Because they have bad directors?
All this technology will do is show everybody that they suck at directing and realize that maybe they aren't better than Steven Spielberg, etc.
There are subtle tricks you (actually the just directors, 99.99% of the people don't know them) can do with the camera such as tilting it very slightly to influence what a person is feeling, to make them want the character to choose the door on the right instead of the left, to help tell your story. Directors use that stuff.
How about some of those shots in AI such as the boy mecha in the pool where the camera goes up far away and pans out in order to show how alone he is? It wouldn't convey the same emotion if you could just move the camera around anywhere you wanted.
How about suspense? Of course you want to know what is around the corner! But the director won't show you because he wants to build anticipation...
Besides TV/movies are passive stories, quite different than video games. People want to sit down and have a story told to them by a good story teller, they don't want to have to work at it.
Reminds me of those aweful ideas where the audience could vote on plot elements...
I guess for porn and sports there is a potential market for this technology.
Remember when Toshiba tried to make their Nuon, if not it was some gaming system that came out like 6 months ago but no one knew about it because it wansnt its own system, it combined with dvd players. Well they tried to this with DVD's this interactive feature, and it flopped.
Gaming Shizzle
Speaking as someone on the inside, I DO know why Hemos is pre-occupied... His wife just forked a new process (see man vfork() for more details) and gave birth to their first child, a beautiful young daughter. Congrats, Hemos :) :)
Okay, I can see porn as the ONLY useful way to use something like this.
;)
Who the hell wants to "interact" with "Emeril", "The West Wing", or hell, "The View". Its not practical, its not useful, and it doesn't "enhance" the viewing pleasure any more. In fact, it would probably decrese it.
But I'd love to have something like this to watch porn on. Can't wait to see something like "Afro Whores" or "Cowboy Neal Gangbang" in something like this.
This subject has already been discussed here, here and here on slashdot before.
Your comment violated the postercomment compression filter.
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Who in the hell wants to watch TV with a helmet on? I personally like to think of TV watching as a passive activity, where I sit there and watch (vegetate) without having to think about from what angle, etc. I want to see everything from.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
Imagine watching some sport event, and being able to chose which camera angle you want to watch it from right now. Not being limited to what the director thinks would be interesting right now, but what you want to see - and be it the Candid Cheerleader Cam ;-)
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I don't know why I'm responding to such a blatant troll. Maybe I feel the need to educate some of the clueless slashbots who might otherwise be taken in by your misinformation.
Steven Spielberg is a horrible director. AI is a terrible film. Spielberg's cheap, heavy-handed attempts at manipulating the viewer's emotions are tiresome examples of anything BUT good direction.
Spielberg is to Good Directing as John Grisham is to Great Literature. HTH.
KTS:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Utensil.
There is no contradiction.
Of course the next step in this vein would be to team it up with a tactile / force feedback glove.
Can you imagine Diablo II with this kind of a setup.
Way cool!
games, which i guess is just another kind of porn, but imagine a FPS on one of these deals.
though it would have to be set up arcade or pub style, since i would be damned before i blew that kind of coin on game peripheral at home.
Finally some employment for dot-bombers.
Custer's Revenge: The greatest video
I always assumed the "set" came from "television set". Not that it makes any difference..
The truth is there are several companies who have been attempting to bring immersive video to consumers for several years now. Some of them are:
Be Here
Immersive Media
Imove
Ipix
Enroute
The first and most successful immersive video system AFAIK is Disney' Circle Vision theater in Tomorrowland, which has been open since 1971.
The biggest problems in delivering immersive video are bandwidth, resolution, frame rate, and parallax. Selection of delivery media affects the bandwidth problem which of course is related to frame rate and resolution.
The parallax problem arises in multiple camera solutions. Basically, in order to seemlessly mosaic images from multiple cameras, they have to have the same nodal points or the objects in the scene need to be very far away. Single camera solutions (using specially shaped mirrors) suffer from low resolution. Multiple camera solutions that use mirrors, such as Disney's Circle Vision system, can achieve low parallax but tend to have a limited verticle coverage.
If you can event a wide angle lens that places its nodal points behind the image plane then there is a valuable patent waiting for you.
Many DVDs support different viewing angles already (mostly pr0n DVDs) so what is new in this HDTV thingy. Even the video stream is MPEG-2 except that HDTV uses higher bitrates (if using higher resolution, but if lower resolution is used, it really cannot be called HDTV), the bitrates are from 10mbps to 18.5mbps and this doubles with the angles and eats alot of bandwidth.
- Raynet --> .
This is all great and everything, but I'm afraid it will be a hard sell.
Being that most cable networks won't even carry a single HDTV channel for eating into precious bandwidth for more important broadcasting (ie: multiple ppv and home shopping channels), it's really a moot point.
Ok, this might sound a bit silly given the matrix style football footage they threw together recently, but is it really that easy to wander around in real time within a TV show? Where would the raw feeds from all the cameras be merged and transformed into a 3D image? Where would they be rendered?
The set top box could have only a couple of CPUs, and the best speed available is what? 60 gips from Chuck Moore's 25x? That's not enough for local real-time rendering at 30fps.
Doing the rendering at the cable provider would introduce a problem with scalability, because it'd have to send a custom image to well over 10,000 users. In real time. As they wander around.
I guess these people will need to wait a few more years before letting users walk around in their favorite soap, but turning their head while watching from specific cameras isn't as big a leap. Oh well. Real-time effects like that WILL be cool WHEN the set top box has enough power, or when pre-recorded shows are pre-processed and broadcast in a more friendly format, like, say, polygons.
However, do you really watch TV to play video games?
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
This idea I think would only work for television and movies of specific genres where one would WANT more viewing angles. In particular, porno, sports, and sci-fi.