Slashdot Mirror
Consumer 3D Television Moving Forward
TheSync writes "Hollywood Reporter claims that SMPTE (the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) will 'establish an industry task force to define the parameters of a mastering standard for 3D content distributed via broadcast, cable, satellite, packaged media and the Internet, and played-out on televisions, computer screens and other tethered displays.' Already, Japanese Nippon BS viewers with Hyundai 3D LCD sets can watch an hour of 3D programming daily. Even your existing DLP TV set might be 3D capable today with the addition of LCD shutter glasses."
Reader DaMan1970 makes note of another developing television technology; telescopic pixel displays. "Each pixel consists of 2 opposing mirrors where the primary mirror can change shape under an applied voltage. When the pixel is off, the primary & secondary mirrors are parallel & reflect all of the incoming light back into the light source."
Porn.
Why else would you want a 3D experience?
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
I wouldn:t buy this until IEEE is on board...
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
When I sit down at my computer i am engaged and am accomplishing something(most of the time), but when i sit down to watch TV i want to be completely relaxed and just watch. If this means i will have to be more aware of my TV then im not for it. Also my TV is often on in the background, which means I'll have to wear the special glasses all the time which isn't gonna happen.
I have a pair of e-dimensional 3d glasses (yes, they DO work if you have the right set-up and some patience*), and can say after showing them to a few people, several issues will keep 3d from mainstream:
Motion sickness
Astigmatism
Eye strain
The fact some people just can't plain see it despite having 2 eyes
Battery life of wireless shutter glasses
Looking like a nerd
There's some serious patience required to adjust to it, its not natural to focus your eyes direction at one depth, and change the actual focus to another. When what your looking at is far away (like a movie screen), its a lot easier. When its a TV or computer screen that is just a few feet away, its harder to adjust to, and for a lot of people if they don't instantly "click" with something then its hard to get them to want it.
Speaking of the obvious thought of porn, I'm surprised magazines haven't tried using stereoscopic pictures. This is a really easy 3d trick anyone can do- simply take two pictures of a static object side by side with the camera pointing towards a certain object (make sure its the same object in each one!). Put them next to each other, then slowly cross your eyes until they merge. It'll form a 3d picture, full color, no special equipment required, no red/blue glasses to give people headaches. The further apart the pictures are taken, the more pronounced the 3-d effect. You'll want to use the cross-eyed effect as opposed to the "looking into the picture" effect because it allows for a larger picture.
Why else would you want a 3D experience?
Goatse and Tub Girl in 2D was disturbing enough.
The big news in the movie theater business is that Regal, AMC and Cinemark are closing a deal with Hollywood to pay for digital 3D projectors going into many of their theaters so the big summer movies of 2009 can look better than anything an HDTV can do. But if HDTVs will do stereoscopic 3D in a few years, then Hollywood and the theater chains have just blown a huge amount of money on tech that'll only get customers out of their homes for a few years.
This is why theaters need to stop pushing performance and start pushing features. With digital projection, movie theaters can theoretically show everything that's popular on TV: live sports, live news, talk shows, religious shows, long running scripted dramas and comedies. It's even technically possible for theaters to connect video game hardware to the projector and run controllers down to the audience so people can play a video game on the big screen. Of course, it'll be hairy for theaters to get the rights to show any of these things, but the relentless progression of home market tech, especially when it comes to screen size and picture quality, means it's just too expensive for theaters to stay ahead. Theater digital projectors are big and not mass produced, so even if they only perform a little better than home market projectors, they're vastly more expensive and won't come down in price. The last thing theaters need is to blow a huge wad of cash on a new projector, then have to buy another one in a few years.
What's much smarter for theaters to do is buy the least expensive Hollywood-approved projector they can (Christie's CP2000-M is 2.2 megapixels and is bright enough for screens up to 35 feet wide), then feed it with every conceivable kind of content. News reels died in the 1960s not because people don't want to drive to theaters to watch the news (the communal setting actually improves news just as much as it improves movies), but because only TV could show news live. Now theaters have most of the tech they need to show live news, but it hasn't occurred to them to ask the TV networks for content. Theaters still think Hollywood is the only sugar daddy they have.
It's great news that HDTVs will soon get stereoscopic 3D. I just hope Hollywood and movie theaters don't use it as an excuse to replace their projectors yet again. They need to compete against the home market creatively, not by throwing more dollars at the projection booth.
... and we were happy!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
After decades of annoying flicker, strobing, and bad pans at 24FPS, we finally got LCD panels that don't flicker at all. Some monitors even time-interpolate to get the frame rate up, and framefree compression is just starting to work. Now people want to crud it up with alternating-frame stereo. Bleah.
Stereo vision doesn't really do much beyond about 4m or so, and it scales badly for anything that isn't its real size.
There are some very cute 3D systems that are sensitive to head position, so you can move your head and have the scene adjust accordingly. But that doesn't work in theaters.
I don't get why people want this. Most real-world 3D perception (the kind of scenes you see in movies) derives from motion parallax, not binocular stereo. Trying to use stereo for those scenes is completely unrealistic and visually disturbing.
Also, flat images are kind of scale free, but 3D scenes are not. If you watch Jurassic Park in 3D on your television, you really do see a bunch of 8 inch toy dinosaurs fighting in a little box. Ooh, scary.
... they'd start supporting AIGLX/Xgl, we may have real-time Compiz-Fusion effects! I mean, consider this: Me: *Checking my email* Brother: *Walks into the room* Me: *Shouts* GET THE FUCK OUT OF THERE!! You have stepped in my message box! NO, NOT THERE YOU DUMBASS, that's my 2nd workspace, here *rotates cube* OH DAMN, now you're in the goddamned file manager *Ctrl+Alt+Backspace* Phew, that's better.
Holographic TV, that's just what we need. So millions of geeks can watch Star Wars - and chuckle amusingly to themselves when they see a holograph of a holograph. Someone just shoot me now.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Man, those moderators get weirder en weirder...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
great strides are being made in the use of 3-D DRM. Says Chester Smith of the MPAA, we are now faced with 2 more dimensions to the problem, but I am certain we will prevail.
Of course consumer 3D television is moving forward. Up/down and left/right are already well taken care of by existing 2D television.
How's this for an idea?
How about all you entertainment and media companies just assume that after a hard day's work, all I really want to do is just sit there and BE ENTERTAINED. Yes, you can have a wedge of my cash for the privelige of doing so and if you make it appealing enough to me then I might just drag my fat lazy ass into the car so I can drive to the local cinema to go see what you have on offer.
But please stop with all this "interactive" and gimmicky shit, okay? I can quite happily sit here in front of my computer for the occasionally half-hour and be thoroughly entertained by a 20-year-old 48kb game called "Jet Set Willy" and then be equally entertained by pounding alien heads in Half-Life 2. I don't ALWAYS need whizzy graphics & 8GB of installed game to be immersed, sometimes simple shit does fine.
Likewise, I don't need to "Pick N Mix" my own songs for my own CD compilation because I'm more than happy to accept that an army of musicians, producers & media types are a whole heap better at that shit than I am - most of the time, I just want to give you some money, take a shiny disk in exchange, throw it into my hifi and let it play, okay?
So please don't think I am sat here waiting for 3D TV because somehow I need to be "more immersed" in your shit, okay? Believe it or not, most of the time a 2D TV, a pizza and a few beers is enough to keep me happy.
How about we make it simple? You keep offering good quality shit at a reasonable price and I will just BUY it so I can watch/read/listen to it.
Just DANCE FOR ME MONKEY BOY! Okay?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.