Page 44 - The Channel Issue 2 2010

The nicest display is definitely with the shutter glasses, and it's amazing how quickly you get used to them. But they are expensive – if you have 10 friends coming round to watch the World Cup with you, it becomes a very expensive prospect. However, I am sure that in time engineers will refine

autostereoscopy so that we will no longer need glasses at all.

This is the biggest problem at the moment. There have been some attempts, using clever software, to process 2D pictures and convert them to stereo 3D with varying degrees of success. However viewers can distinguish between good “real” 3D and bad “synthesised” 3D. At the moment there is no easy way of creating realistic, easy-on-the-eye 3D from 2D but I am sure that too will be developed. It has to.

break in play. When Sky Sports were an SD channel we provided them with our real time graphics, then they upgraded to HD, we followed suit, and now they wanted to have real time stereoscopic 3D graphics. They tested ours and we won the contract.

When a channel is looking at going stereo, either occasionally or for a whole new channel, there are many new things to change. There is new equipment to buy, learning about the technology and concern whether you are making the right decisions since there are so few reference points. One thing they didn't need to worry about was their Viz system. Because our graphics have always been 3D they will work with whatever camera system they choose, whatever processing and editing they want to do, whatever distribution method. When an artist designs an animation he is actually using 3D objects and is moving them in three dimensions - in Z space as it's known. It's then a relatively simple matter to enable these animations that were used in the past in a 2D context for stereo 3D. Sky did this – it was a far simpler process for them to take graphics that they had already designed and templated for the HD channel and use them as the basis of the graphics for the stereo channel. So in a way it has been easier for us to take on the challenge of stereoscopy compared to others who only had 2D real time systems.

More and more stereo-enabled screens are now being marketed but there is no one industry standard at the moment. There are essentially two types of 3D glasses. One uses circular polarised light where one image is polarised in one direction and the second image is polarised in the other direction. And each lens of the glasses acts as a filter to allow only the one that is in the right plane to pass it. So each eye sees a different image. The

problem with these glasses is that they can give a slightly dim picture. The other type is electronic glasses with an in-built battery. The image for each eye is shown at 50 or more frames a second, and as one eye’s image flashes up, the shutter for that eye opens – then when the next image comes up, that shutter closes and the other shutter opens up. So each eye is seeing a different image, they are appearing at different times but the brain is fooled because it is happening so fast. The alternative is the autostereoscopic displays which use lenticular lenses. We have been working with the French company Alioscopy and now integrate with them. If you imagine various zones which project out of the screen like a fan, then as long as your head is in one of those zones, 3D works very well. You have to sit at a distance that is dictated by the TV screen, a 40' screen means you have to sit about 4m back. Everybody watching would have to be aligned in front of the screen. If you move your head substantially you can end up either not seeing the stereo effect or, if you have one eye in one zone and the other eye in the other, it will make you feel ill.