Hastening Progress Of 3D Cinema And TV
This is the year in which 3D cinema and 3D TV will make the breakthrough. At CeBIT in Hannover, Fraunhofer researchers are presenting technologies and standards that are hastening the progress.
Strikers and defenders furiously compete for the ball. Suddenly, the forward drops into the penalty area.
The penalty taker carefully sets the ball just right. Cut to the goal camera. Like a cannon ball, the leather flies over and past the heads of the spectators, who are completely awestruck. Except that these soccer fans are not sitting in the stadium, but rather in front of a 3D television, far away from the hustle and bustle of FIFA World Cup football in South Africa.
2010 will be the year in which cinema and television make the jump into the third dimension. Blockbusters like James Cameron's Avatar, Pixar's Ice Age and Dawn of the Dinosaurs have brought in billions box office ticket sales throughout the globe. And now, the time for 3D movies for television has also come.
The industry announced the first 3D televisions will be ready for production by summer. A few games of FIFA World Cup football have already been captured in 3-D. Yet before 3D technology becomes the standard equipment for the movie screen and the telly, a few questions still require some clarification.
For instance, how can the recording process and post-processing be optimized, and the costs for them be reduced? Indeed, Cameron's science fiction extravaganza gobbled down 250 million US-dollars in the making, and required four years of computer work. How can the tools for the post-production of movies be improved? And the sixty-four thousand dollar question: 3D-glasses, or no 3D-glasses?
To address these issues, experts from the film industry, academia and research joined forces in the consortium "PRIME: Production and Projection- Techniques for Immersive Media."
Together they are exploring and developing business models and techniques for cinema, television and gaming. Participating partners include KUK Filmproduktion GmbH, Loewe, Kinoton GmbH, DVS Digital Video Systems AG, Flying Eye, the Film & Television Academy in Potsdam HFF Konrad Wolff, the University of Duisburg-Essen and the Fraunhofer Institutes for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen and for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut HHI in Berlin. The German federal ministry for economics and technology is funding the project.
"Two synchronized microHDTV cameras record the scene that is transmitted in 3D. (Credit: Copyright Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft)"
Source: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft
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