Sneak Peek: 3-D TV Menu Systems Surprisingly Complicated

• By Eliot Van Buskirk  - WIRED 
• October 6, 2009   
• 5:51 pm 
  

This 2-D screenshot approximates the look of part of 3ality's and Nagravision's 3-D menu system.

It's not the sexiest problem in the world, but someone's going to have to solve it: How, if three-dimensional television becomes the next HD — the way much of the industry hopes it will — are viewers going to navigate those channels?

Regardless of the 3-D technology in place, be it color filter glasses, shuttered glasses, polarized glasses or no glasses, users aren't going to want to either remove their glasses or otherwise switch back to a two-dimensional experience just to change the channel, and simply laying a 2-D menu over a 3-D broadcast doesn't cut the mustard.

3ality Digital, the three-dimensional-film production company that impressed us with the U2 3D concert movie, has partnered with Nagravision, which provides broadcast security, menu systems and/or DVR technology to over 150 cable, satellite and telco partners worldwide (including Comcast and Dish Network), to create a set-top-box menu system that works with any 3-D capable television.

"Once you have a TV that has a 3-D mode, you need to stay in that mode in order to change channels, buy video-on-demand, see what's on next, and that sort of thing," explained Nagravision team leader of consumer electronics Frank Dreyer. But this isn't a mere matter of running the menu through some sort of 3-D-ifier. Because of the nature of three-dimensional viewing, elements in the guide have to feel like they exist somewhere in virtual space in relation to the live video scene happening "behind" them. If the three-dimensional aspect it isn't presented perfectly (or somewhere near it), viewers can experience eye strain or even become nauseated – hardly the desired effect when designing a guide people will deal with every time they tune in.

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Just about every element of the menu guide must be redesigned to add the third dimension. "Our 2-D guide uses transparencies and drop shadows, and we're making things bigger and using picture-in-picture – it's kind of like this modern heads-up display," said Dreyer. "But in 3-D, suddenly the video's not a piece of glass behind the guide — it's all immersive, so you can't do transparency, you can't bleed your graphics to the edges, you have to manage picture-in-picture very carefully, you have to set different font sizes and colors to manage the ghosting effect. There's a lot of challenges."

And whereas the old guides only need to be calculate the position of a pixel on two axes, X and Y. But things get more complicated in three dimensions, where calculations must account for two X axes and two Y axes — a pair for each eye — in order to take care of the Z axis, which is the one that makes you feel like you're peering into your flat television.

3ality Digital aims to solve this problem in the next version of the menu system by including metadata about the spatial aspects of every frame of video, which the set-top box can use to display menu elements with more three-dimensional accuracy relative to whatever is playing in the background. The same system will help set-top boxes present 3-D video broadcasts on a variety of television models, according to 3ality Digital COO/CTO Howard Postley. The heavy processing to accomplish this happens during production, in order to minimize the strain on — and expense of — set-top box processing hardware. "If everybody was running a Mac tower next to their TV, you could do all kinds of stuff," explained Dreyer, "but even the most high-end set-top-box today costs $200-$250 bucks [to make]."

We viewed the 3-D menu system created by 3ality and Nagravision as demonstrated on a polarized glasses set connected to a demo server. An underpowered demo server added a few buffering-related jitters to the video, but the menu system I was there to see looked pretty neat — elements popped out of the screen when selected, and selecting a movie from pay-per-view section felt a bit like picking out a movie off of the shelf at a brick-and-mortar rental shop (a comparison that could become more apt if remote controls evolve to take the Z axis into account). And I didn't feel eyestrain toggling through the menu screens.

Dreyer expects 3-D set-top boxes using this menu system to enter certain markets by the second half of 2010 to target the first round of early adopters, possibly overseas first (their primary demo server was in France). But considering the complexity of these menu systems — not to mention the challenges associated with presenting television in 3D in general — it's going to require lots of heavy lifting by the cable and satellite industries and just about everyone who works with them, if three-dimensional television broadcasts are going to become commonplace.

Much of 3-D television's fate will be decided at January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.