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MillimeterStereo Hype
Feb 18, 2009 12:00 PM, By Trevor Boyer
Stereoscopic 3D is enjoying a renaissance in theaters, but what are its prospects for the rest of the video production market?
Glasses-free 3D
If the demand for stereoscopic 3D content is to continue its growth, skeptics are going to have to be won over. It's not HD — naysayers can't be convinced of a new format's superiority the first time they walk by a football game playing on a new television at Best Buy. For the most part, they're going to need glasses.
How are theater chains going to convince their customers to pony up the premium to view a 3D title for the first time? A company called Alioscopy thinks it has the solution.
Glasses-free autostereoscopic 3D is the holy grail of stereoscopic display, and as such, it's an expensive, bleeding-edge proposition in 2009. Still, for certain public display environments, no expense is too much — witness the success of Panasonic's 103in. plasma. Alioscopy is targeting movie-theater lobbies as one environment that's worth the price of glasses-free display. And the company's current offering is a technological leap forward. It's not stereo, technically — by assigning a tiny lens to each sub-pixel (thereby sacrificing a little resolution, but not much), Alioscopy displays are able to display eight camera views. A viewer standing in one of the screen's many sweet spots can pan left and right slightly and see around an object to a degree that's impossible for traditional stereoscopic display systems.
It's not just theater lobbies where Alioscopy wants to play, of course. There's also medical and aerospace firms that would benefit from a hyper-3D screen in order to view complex models. “We're in the process of moving into two research and engineering agreements with two medical firms,” says Pia Maffei, director of operations for Alioscopy.
But on the content side, who's producing eight camera views at this point? Alioscopy is playing in that space as well. The flagship product from the company is a modified NEC 40in. LCD display with a lenticular cover, but there's also a 24in. display that Alioscopy offers production companies creating autostereoscopic content. To facilitate this new production paradigm, the company also offers content creators the necessary scripts and plug-ins to achieve eight-camera-view rendering in Softimage|XSI and Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya, as well as e-training.
There's competition for Alioscopy in the autostereoscopic display space; for several years, Philips has offered glasses-free 3D flatscreens covered by lenticular sheets, but these actually display a single-camera view with Z-depth information transmitted via grayscale percentages. Of course, Philips' new 52in. LCD, the QFHD 3D display, blows its previous 42in. and 52in. 3D models' specs out of the water. A new rendering technique, combined with the quad-HD resolution of 3840×2160, enables up to 46 camera views. For its part, LG Electronics is pushing glasses-free True3D displays to the home market.
— T.B.
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.