I was also surfing the Internet at work today while waiting for an InDesign CS install to fail for the third time in a row when I ran across this at the BBC: Sky Moves to 3D Broadcasts. Apparently when one starts a stereoscopic blog, it's a bit like buying a new car. Suddenly you see the new model all over the road.
The story takes what I said about 3D on television and advances it a few years. Apparently they are testing it now and, as we predicted, on sports. They only tested it on a small audience and they used polarized glasses. That means either 1. they had two projectors inside the TV throwing the image on a single screen or 2. they have a new screen technology that does polarization in a new fashion - perhaps with interlaced pixels. In any event, if they spent money on setting up equipment at a stadium, then they must be close to making it happen.
So far the first few entries of this nascent blog has been mainly about business. I promise to get into the research and technology aspect soon. It's just that I underestimated how quickly the consumer electronics companies are moving on this!
"Did I tell you it can also travel in time?"
Hollywood directors fighting over their toys
While in the throws of a Wikipedia bender, I stumbled across an interesting debate between two visionary directors: James Cameron and Tim Burton. Cameron is filming his first post-Titanic fiction movie in 3D. It's a sci-fi shoot-em-up called Avatar. Burton is filming his next big movie, an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass. Both are planning to release the movies in 3D.
In my last post I mentioned how easy it is to take 3D animation and re-render it into a 3D movie. Both of these movies are going to include heavy use of CGI (animation), all of which can be re-rendered. However, what about the live actors?
Cameron is doing it the traditional way: by filming the actors from two viewing angles. Burton is going to film in 2D and use computer gimmickry to try and recreate a 2nd viewing angle. Traditionalists call this cheating. Burton's producer sez that if you can't tell, who cares? He scores a point there. It's all about fantasy, anyway. But can the technology truly pull it off?
Cameron also goes on to attack the DVD releases using the blue-red anaglyph glasses. I'll explain soon why that is considered low quality, but is thus far the only option available.
Hollywood power plays and gossip about 3D technology? Stereoscopy has arrived.
In a future post I'll cover how I managed to wander into the stereoscopy field. For now I want to talk about one of the reasons why I decided to make it a major focus of my academic research: business.
In my opinion, stereoscopic projection is the next HD. In 10-20 years most TVs will support it. The reason? Hannah Montana and Joe Theisman.
I am not a father (yet), so I haven't been indoctrinated into the phenomenon that is Miley Cyrus. However, her father Billy Ray hit it big when I was in high school so I remember him well. In particular, I remember seeing a triple bill concert where he was the last "headliner" act. Everyone walked out after the second act. But apparently he had enough talent to co-spawn Miley.
Her last movie, Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds was a stereoscopic/3D movie. It made $70 million (worldwide theatre revenue) on a $7 million budget. That's enough to make even the most blockheaded Hollywood exec sit up and take notice. It was shown in theatres using polarized glasses (the DVD uses red/blue anaglyphs).
Disney's right hand was aparrently aware of what the left hand was doing. Their Pixar division learned from this and decided that all future movies will be released in 3D. Dreamworks soon followed suit. This makes natural sense. Once a 3D animated movie has been produced, it takes very little additional effort to re-render the same movie from a slightly different camera angle. I have no knowledge of this, but my guess is that it would cost about 1% of the overall budget of the movie. With two versions of the movie that differ only by a slight camera angle, you have an easy 3D film. This is why concert movies are also popular in 3D (U2 did it recently too). The concert occurs on a single stage, so it is easy to setup multiple camera angles.
What else occurs on a single, fixed stage surrounded by cameras? Sports. There is a reason digital/satellite/HD technologies all embraced sports first. The avid sports fan is, well, a fanatic. They will pay big bucks as early adopters to get their fix bigger and badder than before. Samsung, Hyundai, Philips and other television manufacturers are quickly rolling out competing stereoscopic technologies. How much do you want to bet that they will be cutting deals with the major sports as their major content generators?
That makes me think to a defining moment of my sports life. When I was ten I watched Joe Theisman suffer a compound fracture of his leg on national TV. It was a sick moment. Now imagine it in stereo.
