Monday, August 30, 2010

3D Television Without Glasses




Watch the video here as it does help in understanding the tech.  Otherwise, I have packed two items that describe it all pretty well into this post.

It is enough to know that 3-D viewing in an at home setting is coming in about six years and that should mean that it is cheap enough and good enough for the true mass market in ten years.

A pleasant surprise is that the protocol shown here will also allow viewing at a reclining position and any other angle.  In fact, this is now good enough to mostly simulate the effect of the holodeck of Star Trek fame.  Not quite, but close enough to enjoy.

Now the giant question is what are we going to do for an encore?  Our real technical limit appears to be the point in which the observer is no longer able to discern the difference between reality and fantasy from the observation seat.

We are going to have to expand our senses.


AUGUST 27, 2010

We [Science and Technology Research Laboratories, NHK(Japan Broadcasting Corporation), Tokyo, Japan] have developed integral three-dimensional (3D) television using an ultra high definition imaging system. The system uses a device having 7680 pixels in the horizontal direction and 4320 pixels in the vertical direction for each of the red, green, and blue channels. A lens array comprising 400 lenses is configured in the horizontal direction and one comprising 250 lenses is configured in the vertical direction. The system is designed to ensure a maximum spatial frequency of 11.3 cycles/degree and a viewing angle of 24 degrees when the display is observed from three times the display height. The setup described here has simultaneously maintained the balance between the maximum spatial frequency and the viewing angle by shortening the focal length of the elemental lens while narrowing the pitch of the elemental lens. We have confirmed the generation of 3D images with an appearance that varies in a natural manner according to the position of the observer.


 


MAY 30, 2010




Basically Japan is promising true 3D television and images that do not require glasses and full court 3D experience (pretty close to holodeck like) by 2022. They will be using 60 to 100 million pixels of resolution to create the 3D effect. They demonstrated a 33 million pixel system in Las Vegas in 2009. 


The high-tech projects include images being beamed onto giant 3-D hologram-style flatbed screens, translation earpieces for fans of different nations to converse with each other, and devices to instantly capture information by pointing at players on the pitch. The bidding team has enlisted the help of Keio University professor and Internet pioneer Jun Murai to help with the technology that forms the backbone of the proposal. Murai acknowledged the challenges that lie ahead, but insists the communication devices and "Full Court 3-D Vision" are more than just fantasy.



They are the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, a Japanese national entity. 


“It’s like the holy grail… what all media is theoretically going toward. This is not stereoscopy. This is real 3D of everything. You don’t need glasses,” he said. 


NICT’s holography is very crude and at cursory glance, unimpressive. Schubin said most onlookers were underwhelmed. The display consists of an optical table resembling a slab of granite with a bunch of lenses and mirrors controlled by micrometers moving them fractionally 


Now here is more on the NICT electronic holography. On the reproduction end, it appears to be true wavefront reconstruction. Laser beams are used just as they were in original holograms to reproduce the wavefronts captured in the interference patterns of the holograms. Three lasers were used for the three primary colors. The resulting hologram appeared to float in space. It was tiny and had a limited viewing angle. It also suffered not only from laser speckle but also from other noise. 


On the capture end, the system is not holographic. It uses something called an “integral camera.” It is an ultra-high-definition camera (sometimes referred to as 8K) shooting a normally-lit scene through a “fly’s-eye” planar array of small lenses. A computer then processes the image into an interference-pattern type hologram, using the wavefront information captured from the fly’s-eye lens array. The interference patterns are then sent electronically, live except for the processing latency, to three small liquid-crystal displays, which are illuminated by the reproduction lasers.


Incidentally, across the aisle, NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corp.) showed a very similar 8K integral camera. But this time the image was projected directly through another lens array onto a screen. Viewers needed no 3D glasses and could move their heads to see around objects. 


3DTV Based on the Integral Method

  • The 3DTV with integral method is based on extremely high resolution video.
    * The experimental setup produces full-color and full-parallax 3D images in real-time, however, the setup has not reached practical level yet.
    * To produce higher quality 3D images for television, it requires a larger number of pixels for the capture and display stages. Although this problem must be overcome, our experimental setup has been progressed one step for practical use.


  • 3DTV : based on integral method (9 page presentation from 2009)