As the smoke clears from the 2010 CES, it’s hard not to look at 3D as the next big thing happening soon in home entertainment. It’s hard not to get caught up in the frenzy and feel the excitement that surrounds it.
3D entertainment is in a very tough position right now. It offers some of the best video content that can be seen and an unparalleled home experience, but it comes with a few significant catches: 1) the cost for hardware will be higher than almost anything else – yes we’re still in a recession; 2) the cost for content is higher than other formats; 3) most of what users can see won’t be in 3D; and 4) there’s still those awkward glasses that seem to come only in ’70s space age or groovy Buddy Holly designs.
Now that the dust has settled, it’s time to see if the future of 3D is found wearing these specs or if it’ll need rose-colored glasses.
One of the big fears about 3D is that there will be some repeat of the standards formatting war that was seen with HD discs. It could very well be shaping up that way – or at least, the confusion in the CE industry about standards will translate into a perceived format war by consumers.
The first thing we heard on this was from Rick Dean, VP of strategic development at THX and chairman of the 3D@Home Consortium, who said the consumer “shouldn’t have to worry.”
Dean said the big issue is matching the right products with the right homes and users; sets and systems do offer different experiences, and users should be educated on that.
Digital projection standards began development in 2000, Dean said, and while standards will continue to develop, “there’s no issue about going out and buying a 3D TV set to consume 3D. We’re at a good launch point; it’s a great experience.”
Josh Greer, president of RealD – the technology provider behind James Cameron’s incredibly successful 3D film “Avatar,” and the provider of 3D glasses for Intel’s CES keynote address – paints a very different picture about standards bodies and the future.
“There’s so much misinformation and misunderstanding out there about what [is needed] for a 3D display; it’s a little bit of Wild West right now,” Greer said during a CES panel discussion.
Greer mainly expressed worry over the technical discrepancy between 3D films at the theater and 3D movies in the home. There’s a lot of money to be made by bringing this content to the home, so 3D TVs look very appealing. The problem with studios, though, is “They’ve spent a few billion dollars on 3D content, and they’re used to having those other windows into the home – the second, third and fourth markets – but those don’t exist yet,” he said.
One Panasonic engineer told The Register (a bit of tongue-in-cheek here): “A standard? This is America! We’ll have dozen of standards!” Greer echoed the thought a bit, telling the press, “We’re at the beginning” of standardization. “[There’s been] some great preliminary work done by SMPTE, and the CEA’s been doing stuff,” he said. “There’s probably going to be 10 to 12 standards bodies that stick their fingers into the whole 3D thing by the time it’s done.”
Greer did give some support for those 3D Blu-ray discs, however, telling the paper, “This year, we’ll see the first Blu-ray spec for 3D,” and its multiview video coding, often called MVC, “will come out at the end of this year, which is great.”
The solution to all of this might just lie in something more familiar in the digital space: metadata. Dean said the big thing to do is to develop a metadata system that could tell a TV set exactly what’s going on in the video and how to configure that data feed. This could then be broadened to help different systems decode the same signal and provide a little interoperability with devices built at different places along the standardization timeline.
Right now, it’s hard to tell what devices have the right strategy and what model consumers will prefer. It’s tougher still to predict what’ll crash and burn six months after it first hits the shelves. What’s important now? The different levels of technology and the different combinations being pushed.
Let’s start with the part that seems to be the most annoying: those 3D glasses. Three types are currently available: active shutter glasses that rapidly blink your eyes alternately on and off electronically; passive glasses that use circular polarized lenses; and passive glasses that use linear polarized lenses.
Passive glasses basically work by showing the eyes two overlapping images in differently polarized light. Active glasses talk to the TV. Instead of putting two images on the same screen, one image at a time is shown with incredible speed while the lenses just as rapidly close off one eye and then the other.
Active glasses are said to produce a smoother 3D feel, but showroom floor reactions seemed mixed. They’re also likely to be a good bit more expensive to replace.
Aside from the glasses, different TV technologies all have their own woes to deal with, from OLED and DLP to Plasmas and the various mini-standards within LCDs. There are also TV sets that enhance 2D pictures to 3D – another standard of display to take into account.
Blu-ray discs seem to have a 3D standard that’s ready to go, but the players will have to know how to talk to each of these different TVs and different glasses, which leaves room for some data to be lost in translation. Connected devices will have to be backward and forward compatible with just about everything for the time being, which will be a headache.
Speaking of headaches, you might want to test out that new TV set thoroughly before making any purchases. Eye experts have begun sounding off about the tech, warning that 3D could result in headaches for many users and that they should have their eyes checked before getting the set.
“There are a lot of people walking around with very minor eye problems that, under normal circumstances, the brain deals with naturally,” Dr Michael Rosenberg, an ophthalmology professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago told AfterDawn. However, 3D “translates into greater mental effort, making it easier to get a headache.”
Dr. Deborah Friedman, a professor of ophthalmology and neurology at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York agreed and also told the site that the 3D illusion “viewers see in three dimensions in the movies is not exactly calibrated the same way that your eyes and your brain are. If your eyes are a little off to begin with, then it’s really throwing a whole new degree of effort that your brain now needs to exert. This disparity for some people will give them a headache.”
The worst part is that 3D content might not hold an interest for some. Dr. John Hagan, a fellow with the American Academy of Ophthalmology, said that anyone with a lack of depth perception or eye muscle issues may not be able to see 3D images at all or will have trouble processing the images.
The technology has improved over the years and has addressed some of these problems – it abandoned the ever-present nausea by switching to a single projector system instead of two separate ones. But many outliers can still affect image; many consumers will still be susceptible to vision or vestibular distress.
Editor’s Note: Always use 3D glasses when viewing content that requires their use. Staring at a 3D image that requires active glasses, say at a showroom floor when glasses aren’t available, puts a heavy strain on the eyes and can quickly lead to headaches and blurred vision. It even caused at least one person to lose his balance.
Perhaps the most talked about piece of 3D content at CES was the film “Avatar,” which is truly redefining 3D film. As of the beginning of this week, it had reached $1.3 billion in ticket sales and is projected to break $1.6 billion by this weekend. It’s on everyone’s “to-buy” list when they invest in a 3D home theater. But what about looking past this revolutionary film?
When asked last week if any other films of similar scale or ambition are currently in the pipeline, Alec Shapiro, senior VP for sales and marketing of Sony’s content creation group and whose digital cameras were used on “Avatar,” told The New York Times, “Not to my knowledge. I can’t, offhand, see another half-billion-dollar production.”
A worthwhile note about “Avatar”: It cost roughly $460 million and has been in the works off and on at some level for the past 15 years, according to the paper.
“While ‘Avatar’ is likely a watershed for digital and 3D technology,” said Anthony DiClemente and George Hawkey in a Barclays Capital report, “it does not tell us that the underlying economics of the film business have changed.”
“Tron: Legacy,” a cyberspace adventure from Walt Disney Pictures, is due out in December. It’ll use the same 3D system as “Avatar,” but so far, it isn’t clear how much the film relies on the 3D world and how deeply it will resonate with viewers. One other production using the same technology and is due out in late 2011.
So if that’s, at most, three films in three years, the industry will depend on more traditional TV content to bring 3D to the home. This explains why there’s a big industry backing for DirecTV to rollout its 3D content soon and to make it available to all of its more than 25 million subscribers.
ESPN will rollout with 85 sporting events shown in 3D this year, starting in June with the FIFA World Cup. At roughly three hours per event, that’s 255 hours of content. That’s a little bit more than six weeks’ worth of programming, and with ESPN saying it’ll go dark when the content isn’t airing live, that’s 88% of the year in total darkness.
Other broadcasters are toying with the notion, but there are very few other announcements.
Considering all the announced and hinted-at content coming out this year, it’s safe to say that 90% of the content consumers will watch will not be in 3D – lots of estimates put this between 95% and 99%.
Perhaps the biggest announcement released right after CES came from O2 in the UK. O2 is a sponsor of the 6 Nations rugby matches and will be broadcasting some of the matches live in 3D. The drawback is that users will have to go to the cinema to see them. All of the matches will be broadcast to cinemas only – and only a few cinemas overall – which could mean O2 expects a relatively lukewarm demand.
When it comes to 3D in the home, cost is likely a bigger obstacle than content.
At the close of 2008, there were nearly twice as many premium pay-for TV subscribers in North America as there were basic channel subscribers, according to US researcher NSR. The company said the number of 2009 subscriptions should, when the official data is released, reach 24 million and increase to 38 million by 2018.
However, NSR said it will not be adjusting these estimates anytime soon to account for higher-tiered 3D subscriptions. At the end of 2009, there were about 339 million TV sets in the US. More than 33% of these were HD TVs, and the majority of these were LCD sets.
At the same time, TV shipments have been leveling off to around 33 million units per year. This made NSR call the projections of 30 million to 40 million 3D TVs sold in 2010 far fetched. The researcher expects the hype to die down and begin a very gradual period of growth.
If the economy stays a bit delayed in its recovery, the researcher said, the best place for 3D will be in the latter half of this new decade. Even the 3D-ready sets, which can be bought now and upgraded to 3D capability by buying a $100 to $200 adapter down the road, are unlikely to boost sales. These devices could actually hamper some experience unless consumer education is put in the forefront.
For 3D, it appears that the “want” is there, but it’s still fairly uncertain whether the money and the willingness to buy is actually out in the world. There’s no doubt that 3D is the future, but there’s a lot to work on to get it ready for its big deployment.
Content, cost and standards all have to be addressed, but users will also likely need a compelling reason to make the switch. Maybe the Super Bowl and the full set of Premier League matches will hit 3D in 2011, along with enough content filmed in 2010 to give channels a big backlog.