I have a ringside seat at the boxing match between Ricky (the Hitman) Hatton and Juan Lazcano at City of Manchester Stadium. Hatton, the British welterweight, is using his jabs to overpower the Mexican and the 55,000 fans in the audience roar with approval.
I too get caught up in the excitement, which is a remarkable achievement since I am not in the stadium. Wearing geeky polarized glasses, I am watching the fight on a 46-inch, 3-D television at the West London headquarters of BSkyB Ltd., BSY-N Rupert Murdoch's satellite broadcaster. The fight took place last May and Sky's high-definition, 3-D camera rigs were there to record the event.
When the camera angles were right - meaning the shots had considerable depth - I felt I was actually at the fight. Sky's chief broadcasting engineer, Chris Johns, said 3-D TV, at its best, makes you feel that you are "immersed" in the event being depicted: "It's the next big differentiator of TV."
I was less impressed with some of the other 3-D samples played by Mr. Johns. Sky's Gladiators show, where the contestants batter each other with ramrods and run through obstacle courses, made me feel a bit queasy. The angles were too wide and I had trouble absorbing the onslaught of 3-D images.
To be sure, 3-D TV is far from perfect, but it's being billed by some broadcasters and gadget makers as The Next Big Thing. Sky has hinted that the nearly 800,000 customers in Britain who take its digital high-def services will be offered a small range of 3-D broadcasts within a year. It appears that Sky's unofficial goal is to offer a broad range of broadcasts by the 2012 London Olympics. January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was stuffed with 3-D TV sets made by LG, Sony and others. The demonstration set used by Sky was made by Hyundai and cost about £2,500 ($4,460).
But a lot has to happen before 3-D TV becomes a part of everyday life. To become popular, the technology has to be relatively inexpensive and capable of delivering programs that don't leave viewers with headaches. Technology standards have to be set, to prevent competing formats from confusing consumers in the way the Betamax-VHS battle did in the 1980s (Betamax lost).
But most of all, enough quality 3-D programming - feature films, sports, concerts - has to be available to make the sales pitch compelling. If there is a driving force at this stage, it is Hollywood. The big film studios are starting to pump out 3-D movies - the recent Disney film Bolt was shot in 3-D - each of which is a potential candidate for the small screen. "The TV industry will not want to be left unable to show Hollywood's 3-D movies," said Brendan Slamin, the director of the UN HD (High Definition) Forum.
Entertainment in 3-D is nothing new. The earliest confirmed 3-D film, The Power of Love, was shown in Los Angeles in 1922. The 1950s were considered the Golden Era of the format, though various directors and multimedia artists, including Andy Warhol, creator of the gruesomely comic Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, kept the format alive in later years. Imax, in co-operation with the National Film Board of Canada, made its first big-screen 3-D film for Vancouver's Expo 86.
What is different this time, other than Hollywood's renewed interest in 3-D, is the TV industry's sudden pursuit of 3-D in the absence of overwhelming evidence that viewers want the technology on top of the relatively new phenomenon of digital high-def TV. A February survey by the U.S. Consumer Electronics Association found that only 16 per cent of adults polled want to watch 3-D movies or TV shows on their home screen, while only 14 per cent are interested in playing 3-D games. Viewers do, however, enjoy watching 3-D movies in cinemas.
Figures like this have not stopped Mr. Murdoch's Sky and the British Broadcasting Corp. from getting excited about the format (Canadian and American broadcasters appear to have little interest in pushing 3-D in the near future). The BBC is quietly working on a lenticular, or ribbed, screen that does not require the glasses designed to prevent the left eye from seeing the image intended for the right eye, and vice versa. But people who have seen the BBC screen say the image can suddenly lose its 3-D effect if the viewer shifts his or her body position.
Sky has been more open and aggressive about its 3-D plans, probably because it thinks it can deliver the service on the cheap. The broadcaster's digital infrastructure - the satellites, the bandwidth, the decoder box - can equally deliver 3-D broadcasts, it says. All that is missing is a fairly inexpensive 3-D TV set, which it found in the Hyundai model. "The Hyundai TV triggered it," said Brian Lenz, Sky's head of product design and innovation. "We can reuse our own high-def infrastructure."
Late last year, Sky demonstrated 3-D TV at its London site, becoming the first British broadcaster to deliver 3-D to a domestic TV. Although it has done no formal consumer interest studies, Sky believes 3-D is the next leap in the viewing experience that, over the decades, has gone from black and white to colour to digital high-def broadcasts.
It's especially keen on 3-D sports coverage, though it admits producing such programming could be expensive. Sky might use 22 cameras to broadcast a soccer match in high-def; double the number of cameras would have to be used for 3-D because two separate images have to be captured at the same time.
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TV's next leap forward - total immersion
Some broadcasters are calling 3-D TV The Next Big Thing, but a lot has to happen before 3-D TV becomes a part of everyday life. Technology standards have to be set, quality 3-D programming has to be made available and consumers will have to decide if they want the technology on top of the relatively new phenomenon of digital high-def TV.
HOW DOES 3-D TV WORK?
To produce moving three-dimensional images, two separate images need to be captured at the same time.
Special 3-D TV glasses prevent the left eye from seeing the image intended for your right eye and vice versa. The brain processes each image to create one combined picture that seems to appear both in front of and behind the TV screen - appearing three-dimensional.
Sky+HD boxes already have the processing power to be able to receive 3-D signals, store them and deliver them to a 3-D TV.
Two high-definition cameras act like a pair of eyes and focus on the left and right angle of an image.
The two images are edited so colours match and depth and focus are consistant. Images are then converted into one 3-D image via a 3-D processor.
A digital MPEG HD encoder is used to compress the 3D image into an HD-quality digital image, which is transmitted to the Sky Satellite in space.
The Sky Satellite sends a signal of the digital image to the Sky Mini Dish and Sky+HD box in the home.
TRISH McALASTER / THE GLOBE AND MAIL
SOURCE: BSKYB
Eric Reguly