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DVD Player Displays 2D Movies in 3D
Anonymous Writer writes "A company called Dynamic Digital Depth that wants to bring 3D television and movies to the mainstream claims to have developed a system that allows you to watch current 2D DVDs in 3D.
They claim the TriDef DVD Player uses image analysis methods, developed by the company for their 3D content conversion service, to convert 2D video to 3D in real-time based on 3D depth cues in the original movie.
It is the same company that produced the TriDef Movie Player software for the Sharp Actius R3D3 autostereo display notebook.
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I remember reading about converting 2D movies to 3D when I was at primary school. Since then I've been through secondary school, two university courses and two jobs, and I'm still no closer to being able to watch the things.
Still, I look forward to being able to read ten years down the line about an amazing new device that can display current 2D movies in 3D.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Has there been an independent review on this technology? I notice all of the links in the story point at the vendor's web site. Until then, call me a skeptic
Or is this just an ad story?
I'm also firmly believe that VR and 3D displays are the Next Big Thing (TM) - atleast I hope it is. So I say more power to Sharp, DDD and other folks who're trying to make my dream a reality.
On the other hand, I'm not convinced by their "image analysis" based on depth cues:
hey claim the TriDef DVD Player uses image analysis methods, developed by the company for their 3D content conversion service, to convert 2D video to 3D in real-time based on 3D depth cues in the original movie.
As far as I can see converting current 2D media to 3D would require a great deal of human intervention - there's only so much that you can glean from image analysis (possibly hidden edges, object sizes and other CG cues). The bottom line is that it would take a human to tell if which of the two objects on the screen are supposed to be closer to the viewer. That alone IMHO would kill any efforts to bring this to the mainstream media business - it would be more fruitful to focus on cheaper/better techniques to create new 3D media.
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If 3d was impressive enough to sell lots of units, they'd still be making lots of 3d movies. They aren't, because the technology for displaying 3d is still not impressive enough nor widely spread. Once there is truly impressive 3d displays that can be widely deployed, the content will come naturally.
As an aside, I'd love to see Pixar render out a version of Finding Nemo for IMAX 3D - I think it'd be amazing, and would be a relatively small cost. If it was a success, they could do their whole catalog.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
The principle seems straight forward enough. You don't have enough 3D info in a single frame, but you have lots of frames. So as objects move, or the camera pans, you can tell by their apparent positional shift how far from the observer they are. Assuming the software can recognize and track some basic objects, it can make reasonable inferences about their depth into the scene. How it then displays the depth is another issue.
There's plenty of info to construct a 3D-image. There's just not enough to construct the 3D-image.
Part of the bizplan likely involves consumers not caring.
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
Not really that reasonable. If you look at the results of current optical flow and disparity estimation algorithms, they're really not that great. Discontinuities of the image (edges) are a huge problem, as is the whole top-down/bottom-up/gestalt-ordeal, and these have not been solved in any satisfactory manner.
To reconstruct the 3D scene generating the 2D images is effectively to solve vision, in its entirety. In real time, no less. So I would guess that they're doing something quite simple. I'd love to see it, but the information on the site is quite scarce. I'm just hoping that someone is not manually pulling the strings behind the scenes.