By Roland Piquepaille
According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, if the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) can successfully sell licenses for its new stereo vision technology, you soon will be able to watch your favorite movies in 3D with light glasses and at a reasonable cost considering the prices of current 2D home theater systems. This new one, named PSC Stereo Animation System (PSC-SAS), includes some specialized software to speed up the decoding of digital files and a two-processor PC to decode the right and left channels. You'll also need a pair of projectors to display the right and left-eye polarized images on the non-polarized screen simultaneously, and some light glasses. Many 3D visualization technologies have been invented in the last fifty years, but none ever had a broad success. Will this new one come to the market and will it be successful? Time will tell. Read more...Here is the genesis of the project.
With just a few tweaks of a computer program, Dr. Joel Stiles can produce three-dimensional images that seem to jump off of a projection screen in ways so out of proportion to reality that, well, you might experience the sensation of a ruptured cranium.
That, of course, is not the intent of Stiles, a computational neuroscientist at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Rather, he and programmer Stuart Pomerantz developed their stereo animation system because they wanted something that produced high-quality, non-headache-inducing images at a reasonable cost.
"Stereo [image] technology has been around for so long that virtually everyone has seen it, but they have seen it done badly," Stiles said. But he and Pomerantz came up with a process that delivers HDTV-quality stereo viewing by combining their software with off-the-shelf components.
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For example, here is a poster from one of the first movies shown in 3D back in 1953, "It Came From Outer Space." You'll find other 'antique' posters on this 3-D Horror website. [Caution: reduce the volume of your sound card before clicking!] |
But does this new visualization technology have a market?
Stiles and Pomerantz wonder if perhaps their system might have broader applications. Carnegie Mellon University's Innovation Transfer Center is trying to find commercial customers to license the technology, which includes copyrighted software and some patentable elements.
"From our standpoint, stereo technology is horrifically underutilized," Stiles said. Digitally produced movies, such as "Finding Nemo," or most of today's video games, which are based on 3-D representations of data, could be rapidly converted to stereoscopic 3-D with their system, he said. It also might make live action 3-D more attractive.
"Home theater or home entertainment in 2-D has a limited life span," Stiles predicted. He and Pomerantz put their system together for about $12,000. "People spend more than that on home theater systems all the time now for 2-D."
They might be right, even if it would be hard to persuade me to put that much money in what is basically a television. And so far, nobody picked a license.
Robert Conway, project manager for the Innovation Transfer Center, said everyone who has seen a demonstration of the technology "is universally impressed."
But he hasn't yet found a buyer. "They say, 'This is really cool, really great, but it doesn't fit our particular company.' "
You'll find other technical elements of information in this PSC news release.
With PSC-SAS, two projectors display a right and left-eye image on the screen simultaneously, overlaid on each other -- based on the well understood phenomenon of polarized light -- so that one image is polarized at a 90 degree angle to the other. Polarized glasses allow the left and right eyes to perceive the two distinct images separately. With this approach, many viewers at one time can see stereo depth.
"One lens is polarized in one direction," says Pomerantz, "and the other in the opposite direction. As long as the filters on the projectors match the filters on the glasses, you can deliver one image to the right eye and another to the left. It's an old trick."
PSC-SAS implements the old trick with stereo-movie content created by software called DReAMM, developed by Stiles, coupled to playback software called PSC-MP, developed by Pomerantz. To accommodate the high resolution of scientific images, PSC-SAS relies on sophisticated compression techniques that reduce file size, but only to a degree that the eye can't detect as different from the original. PSC-MP delivers the polarized images to the dual projectors in synchrony at high realism. It decodes and transmits data at 100 megabits per second, 20 times faster than DVD data rates, for high-definition quality at 30 frames per second.
[Note: If you want to check the DReAMM website for 3D images, be sure to switch your browser to full screen.]
Just a final thought: if such an equipment was available today, with movies to watch or games to play, would you spend $12,000 for it?
Sources: Byron Spice, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 27, 2004; and various other websites
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