RAPID TV NEWS - Eutelsat ready for 3D, in whatever shape it emerges

Eutelsat ready for 3D, in whatever shape it emerges

Chris Forrester

06-10-2009

A recent Rapid TV News' Round Table discussed the upcoming launch of 3D television in the UK. Eutelsat already has a 3D channel up and running, and is ready for whatever the industry decides. But will it be 'full' 3D or 'half' 3D that consumers get? Michel Chabrol, Director Sales Support & Customer Care, Eutelsat said with this permanent 3D demo channel the company wanted to prove that 3D is now possible for bouquet operators and thematic channels. "We are transmitting a side by side 3D channel at 8 megabits per second," said Chabrol. "That is a bit-rate that is more or less equivalent to a HD channel inside a multiplex and I would say, side by side has a certain degradation because in the line you have only half of the resolution but thanks to a clever algorithm the loss is not 50% but about 25%. So it means that for each eye the definition is not that bad, the resolution is not that bad and it gives good results even for sports. [One example] covers shooting of a basketball event that was made by our partners, with a team from CNI in Italy, which is a very good team. The result is good and we want to prove to broadcasters and pay-TV operators that 3D is possible now, as from now." Ian Trow, Director of Broadcast Solutions at Harmonic, said in the short term that a lot of the big broadcasters are really looking to get their name associated with 3D. Essentially, there is a 'land rush' rush at the moment. "It's undoubted from the reaction at IBC that there are certain screens that are favouring the passive polarised approach," said Trow. "There are some broadcasters, who've got enough traction in the market place, a sufficiently recent set top box, that can either offer live or on-demand solutions within there that they're able to go in there and establish themselves in the emerging 3D market. So I think for a good while yet it will be based around a glasses-based solution because the auto-stereoscopic screens are perhaps four, five years away. They are OK for digital signage now, but not appropriate for a broadcast scenario." Trow agreed that the 'autosteroscopic' 3D camp (a technology which does not need glasses) does not yet address family viewing. "It would cause quite a lot of eyestrain problems for people at the moment. Even the passive polarised sequences, because you haven't got the same orientation between the viewer and the screen, and there are even differences in the size of living room that you have in Europe as opposed to America. Many of the demonstrations are very carefully staged with glasses with very narrow rectangular rooms to ensure that when you are viewing, you're viewing in front of the ideal. "But I think this issue about eye strain, the issue about what actually broadcasters want to market and I think in many cases there's a significant pull through for 3D in the cinema, the budgets that they're actually using there rely upon 3D in the home working and I think there you're in an interesting situation. Can you actually watch 3D for an entire movie? What we're seeing is yes, but would you feel happy watching 3D for an entire evening? There would have to be question marks about that. "So I think that the improvements with technology, because essentially the techniques that are being used, particularly the backward compatible techniques, that are being used over existing infrastructure with possibly changing the screen, are undoubtedly trying to play clever tricks with your eyes, but I think that what we really need for anything further than sort of a 3D movie watching capability is for improvement in compression, those kinds of more long-term developments that will come along with auto-stereoscopic scenes." Eutelsat's Chabrol added: "We transmitted a live concert in July, and I had the opportunity of discussing with cinematographers, the directors, and they said that in order to avoid tiring the viewers in the cinema halls, they tried to have some still cameras, almost equivalent to 2D, that is a very low 3D effect in order to relax the brain and the eyes of the viewers, and prior to this the outside still cameras which were giving a very big, if I can say, 3D effect and by combining both sources they could offer very comfortable viewing for a two hour concert." Wojciech Doganowski, Vice President & General Manager at ADB's IPTV Business Unit, said ADB had been experimenting with 3D for some time. "We were showing 3D in 2008 on the Philips booth at IBC on our existing set top box that we sold to Telefonica so there is existing hardware supporting it. Of course it's side by side, so it's not full 1080i even, but it's giving quite reasonable results. The question is, is it going to be full time transmission where you switch on your TV and you have to put your glasses on? I don't know if public would be happy to do this. I can imagine two hours video on demand in the evening, that's probably no problem at all and as we discussed two hours is OK to watch TV." VIEW or read the complete Round Table by clicking [here] © Rapid TV News 2009

 

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.

Wired Explains:
How 3-D Television Works
TV manufacturers want to bring the 3-D experience to your living room with displays that work much like the ones in the theaters.
Here's how they'll try.
Read more on Gadget Lab

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.