3D TV
Chair's Prerogative Exhibit

A system for real-time acquisition, transmission, and 3D display of high-definition 1300 x 1030 dynamic content. Image acquisition consists of an array of hardware-synchronized cameras that capture multiple-perspective views of the scene. To deal with the high processing and bandwidth requirements, the system uses a fully distributed architecture with clusters of PCs for sending and receiving. A multi-projector 3D display with horizontal parallax only achieves large-scale, high-resolution output images. The system is scalable in the number of acquired, transmitted, and displayed real-time video streams. The hardware is relatively inexpensive and consists mostly of commodity components that will further decrease in price. The system architecture is flexible to enable a broad range of research in 3D TV.

Life Enhancement
This system demonstrates that 3D TV offers a richer, more immersive experience than regular TV. It increases entertainment value and realism without the encumbrance of special glasses.

Vision
Three-dimensional TV is expected to be the next revolution in the history of television. It has only recently become feasible to deal with the high processing and bandwidth requirements for real-time acquisition, transmission, and display of high-resolution 3D TV content. Our system uses existing broadband protocols and compression standards for immediate, real-world 3D TV experiments and market studies. The decoders and receivers are well established and widely available. This system can plug into today's digital TV broadcast infrastructure and co-exist in perfect harmony with 2D TV.

Today, digital broadcast networks carry hundreds of channels and presumably a thousand or more channels after the introduction of MPEG-4. This makes it plausible that a number of them (perhaps 16) will be dedicated to 3D TV. Similar to HDTV, the introduction of 3D TV can proceed gradually, with one 3D channel at first and more to follow, depending on market demand.

Our system uses 16 projectors to produce a view-dependent display with 12.5 million pixels. We believe that new, high-resolution display technologies -- such as organic LEDs (OLED), field emission devices (FEDs), and color nanotube displays -- will achieve similar or higher pixel resolution in the near future. In conjunction with lenticular screens this will lead to inexpensive, high-resolution 3D displays for consumer devices.

Avenues for future work include: high-dynamic-range cameras and displays, precise color reproduction of natural scenes, 3D video conferencing, and deformable 3D displays.

Goals
The main goal of this work is to show that 3D TV systems can be built today from off-the-shelf components.

Innovations
1. Distributed architecture. In contrast to previous work in multi-view video coding, this system uses distributed processing for acquisition, compression, transmission, and image display.

2. Multi-view video rendering. A new algorithm efficiently renders novel views from multiple dynamic video streams.

3. Scalable system. The system is completely scalable in the number of acquired, transmitted, and displayed views.

4. High-resolution 3D display. This is the first display that provides horizontal parallax with 16 independent perspective views per pixel.

5. Computational Display. The system can render new views to improve the 3D display based on feedback from cameras on both sides of the display.

Presentation
Monday, 9 August
10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room 404AB

Contacts
Wojciech Matusik
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories
matusik (at) merl.com

Hanspeter Pfister
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories
pfister (at) merl.com