3DTV is 'Not going to be easy, and there will be surprises' says standards guru

Bringing 3DTV to the home is 'not going to be easy, and there will be surprises' said standards expert Peter Symes of SMPTE yesterday. Speaking at a high-end Digital Television Group (DTG) seminar to which HCC had exclusive access, Symes explained that the technicalities of encoding 3D signals  were proving a challenge - for instance, early attempts at compressing signals using MVC (Multi-View Coding) delivered disappointingly inefficient results.

It wasn't the only note of caution sounded at the seminar, at which the DTG's Simon Gauntlett announced that it would be working to set standards for 3D delivery to UK TVs and computers.

Chris Johns, Chief Engineer of BSkyB, explained that new techniques had to be developed to create 3D material which delivers 'Emotional involvement, rather than the spear-in-your-face effect'. Johns demoed Sky's 3D sports footage, which concentrates on creating a wide immersive sense of perspective, rather than gimmicky effects. Partly this is due to the limitations of the 3D camera rigs, partly because viewers might find the 3D effect tiring if it isn't strictly controlled.

Another note of caution was sounded by Simon Parnall of firmware developer NDS, whose research suggests that a 3D effect designed to work on a large screen viewed from a specific distance might not work on a smaller setup, creating a requirement for rescaling according to the size of your TV.

While the DTG, which maintains the standard for Freeview transmission and hardware, works on defining a 3D standard for UK TV, manufacturers are still competing to come up with different delivery systems - Sony, Samsung and Panasonic with active LED shuttered glasses, LG with a polarised passive glasses system. The 3D broadcast standard will have to be 'platform agnostic', working on either kind of TV.

Steve Venuti of the HDMI licensing body introduced the HDMI 1.4 cable standard at the seminar. This was widely welcomed as a way of supporting a wide range of 3D techniques while making it easier for developers to conform to standards.    

Still, we're tempted to wonder whether it isn't worth waiting until 2020, when technology consultants ZetaCast suggested that we might expect to see 'lightfield' 3D - in other words, a Star Wars-type 'holographic' system which captures every element of the light from a scene, so it can be viewed from any angle. Based mainly on predictions of the processing power needed to handle the amounts of data involved, the estimate seems a bit optimistic to us - but at least you wouldn't have to wear those silly glasses.