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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."
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.
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
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
hasn't this already been posted once? 2 reposts in the same day? you guys are slipping
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.
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
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.
but it sure beaks smellovision.
I believe you are refering to Odorama. This was hyped as one of the innovations of the movie Polyester. When you went into the theater, you get a scratch-n-sniff card with about a dozen numbered dots. When you see the dot in the corner of the screen, you are supposed to scratch that dot and smell...
Naturally, to keep the surprise, the dot would show on the screen a few seconds before you knew what it was supposed to be. I remember air freshener, natural gas, natural gas, model airplane glue.
By the way, I do not recommend this film.
A dingo ate my sig...
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.
My guess is that people actually put set-top boxes under the TV where the VCR usually is or then beside the TV. This is because the wife wont allow men to remove the flower on top of the TV (which is one big reason for TV fires)
- Raynet --> .
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.