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One to One Magazine
October 2008
The Last Word: Leader of 3D@Home Consortium Sorts Out Some 3D Business Issues
As a leader at Insight Media and the 3D@Home Consortium, Chris Chinnock talks to Joy Zaccaria and offers his perspective regarding 3D display technology, its appeal for consumers and manufacturers, and its place in packaged media.
How and why did you get involved in forming the 3D@Home Consortium?
About a year ago,at InsightMedia’s 3D Biz-Ex Conference in
California, I was discussing the lack of co-ordination in the
3D industry; several folks were also talking along similar
lines.There’s a lack of file formats, a lack of standards, and a
lack of co-ordination. From all of that was born the idea of
creating the consortium to bring together the key
stakeholders, try to remove the roadblocks, and get 3D into
the home that much more quickly.
Our mission is to speed the commercialisation of 3D into the home. It’s not a standards group, we are very clear about that. We are not going to write the standards for 3D at various points in the supply chain, but what we will do is act as the facilitator, to talk to all the relevant people, to understand the needs of the various parts of the industry and turn that into a more concise requirements list, and then pass that on to the relevant standards bodies. We are doing the pre-standards work: determining file format standards, compression standards work at various levels of distribution.
"Our mission is to help speed the commercialisation of 3D into the home. It's not a standards group, we are very clear about that." -- Chris Chinnock
What are the various levels of 3D distribution?
There’s the content creation level – it might be film-based
material or digital acquisition; it could be creation in an
animation studio. All that stuff is very high res and has to
be uncompressed.
There are a number of different file formats you could
potentially use for stereo. That has to then be output to various devices – either DVD or Blu-ray, or it could be for
passing to broadcasters, cable operators or satellite
operators. That’s a second level.
A third level is distribution to the home – how
broadcasters or cable operators actually deliver it to your
settop box. Or how it’s packaged – in what file formats
and compression schemes for a disc to go into a Blu-ray player. Once it’s in the settop or Blu-ray player, how do you
get it to the TV? That’s another issue. It generally needs to
be uncompressed.
On top of all that, you want to have backward
compatibility with the 2D infrastructure as much as possible.
You have to weigh each of the various proposals for file
format and compression schemes at each of those four different levels, and look at the scheme from lens to display.
That’s complex; there are technology issues, compatibility
issues, business issues and IP issues. Trying to figure out the
whole riddle is one of the key missions of the consortium.
What are some of the issues regarding disc authoring
for 3D material?
There are several ways to do 3D content. There’s the brute
force method where you provide two video streams; that
could literally be side-by-side video tracks on a Blu-ray, or it
could be two streams: one side is left eye, one side is right
eye. You have to have two decoders in the Blu-ray player.
There is support for dual video streams. It’s not optimised
for stereoscopic display but there is a potential path there.
Some of the infrastructure is in place for the picture in
picture function. Alternatively you can use compression
schemes to get this into one video stream.
Now you’ve got to think about the trade-offs in
compressing this image, and the various ways to do this. You can get it into a single video feed, but the problem is
that some of those algorithms and that format are now proprietary. This means that if you use the Sensio
encoding technique to put a 3D movie into a single video
feed to create a Blu-ray Disc, it is only good for the 3D
version.You’d have to burn a 3D version and a separate
one for the 2D version, or maybe you could put them on
back-to-back sides of the same disc. That’s possible, but
now your Blu-ray player has to have a decoder that can
decode the Sensio format, or your TV has to be able to
decode that format. And the television has to be 3D
capable, of course.
Where is 3D at in terms of industry acceptance from
different players such as display manufacturers and content creators?
The studios and theatre exhibitors certainly get it now. 3D
movies in theatres have been very successful – they are
generating two to three times the revenue of their 2D
counterparts. The slate of first-run movies that are going to
be done in 3D is rapidly increasing, and it’s quite a list already.
The 3D-capable theatre roadmap is in place. Those
installs are increasing and will continue to increase. By 2009, theatres will be at a tipping point where you could
release a movie only in 3D and not even have the 2D counterpart. That’s big. Also going in to the theatres is
alternative content, such as basketball games, operas and
rock concerts. In the theatrical circuit, everyone gets it
and is moving quickly.
Clearly Hollywood needs a path to move that 3D
content to the home. Sixty percent of Hollywood’s
revenue is in DVD or packaged media. Studios need a
path to understand how they are going to deliver this in a
quality format to an install base of 3D televisions, and
they’re part of the 3D@Home Consortium.
Television makers are also coming on board pretty
rapidly. Samsung and Mitsubishi certainly understand it, and all the others are starting to understand the value of
doing this. You’re going to see a lot more 3D-ready and
full-3D TVs going forward.
How does gaming affectthe 3D trend?
Gaming is another important way to deliver 3D content to
the home. PC-based games can be converted very easily to
stereoscopic 3D with an Nvidia card. If you have a monitor
or TV that is capable of showing that content you can see
it today. It’s a matter of awareness – people are just not
using this very much right now. In the gaming industry all
those games are created in a 3D database, so to render a
second-eye view is very easy. As the install base increases,
you’ll see more and more 3D games.
Games are going to be built from the ground up with
3D in mind, rather than as an afterthought. That will
create a different gaming experience and bring new life to
old games.The awareness of that capability is starting to
dawn on the game makers and graphics card makers.
Do you believe 3D will become the de facto way of
viewing, as HD has become?
There’s a lot of debate about that, and I think it’s probably a
long way off. The transition to HD was quite rapid; it’s a
mature market. Television makers are clearly looking for
that nex tbig thing, and I think 3D is likely to be viewed as
that by many people. But I don’t think it’s going to get the
uptake that HD has because not all content is appropriate
for viewing in 3D. And you’ve got the issue of all this legacy
content too. Can you convert all that into a pleasant 3D
viewing experience? The answer is: not very well today.
www.3dathome.org
Profile
Chris Chinnock is presidentof InsightMedia, a
market research, publishing and consulting
company with a focus on the display industry. In
business for about 10 years, InsightMedia’s niche
in the market is technology-focused. With a team
that is very strong technically, the company looks
at where the display industry is going, and anticipates where the trends in technology, such
as 3D, are going to lead.