Intel Bullish on 3D, Calls the Technology ‘A Must-Have’

LONDON -- Home 3D “is a must have” and “will move to immersion” in CE and PC products, Brian Flavel, Intel director of brand strategy, told reporters and industry executives at the company’s “Three Decades of Technology” presentation last week. Unfortunately, the 3D demonstrations at the event, which were set up by third party companies hired by Intel, were well below the standards in 3D demos by other companies.

Intel’s London event focused on the company’s latest Cores i-series processors, which use nearly half a billion transistors on a single chip to provide four cores that handle up to eight processing jobs at the same time. “Older processors just could not handle 3D and 1080p HD video,” Flavel said. “I see no end to Moore’s law, so processors will keep on doubling in what they can do every year or so. We tell our partners what we are doing three years in advance, so that they can plan applications that use what the hardware can do,” he said.

Flavel urged the audience to look at the 3D demonstrations on the premises to back up what he was saying. Those proved disappointing. A demonstration of passive-polarizing 3D, sourced from an unseen PC and displayed with the same JVC LCD-TV and RealD glasses used by Sky, gave a poor impression. It had been installed by a specialist production company and entrusted to a demonstrator who had only a very hazy idea of how it worked. The clips, mainly of sports material and extreme eye-wrenching 3D effects, suffered from being displayed on a screen set up with very poor contrast so there were no blacks, only grays, even at the letterbox edges of the screen.

A neighboring demonstration of active-shutter 3D was equally inept. It comprised the Avatar PC game playing on an Asus laptop with Nvidia graphics and Geforce spectacles. Experienced and neophyte viewers were puzzled, because the screen showed double images even through the 3D glasses. “The trick is to look at the distant background of the picture and then the foreground comes into 3D,” the demonstrator explained. This worked, but did not make for comfortable viewing. “It takes a little time to get used it,” the demonstrator told us. “It’s really for early adopters."

A more skeptical assessment of 3D’s prospects came last week in a webinar hosted by London-based research firm FutureSource Consulting. In a session titled “3D: How Big, How Soon?,” its executives said they're “cautiously optimistic” about home 3D after researching the opportunities for profit and loss.

"We don’t have a format war, but it’s not a done deal,” warned FutureSource Director Jim Bottoms. He was alluding to competitive claims by various 3D stake-holders about the superiority of different display systems for 3D, like plasma versus LCD (CED Feb 25 p1). The Blu-ray 3D standard is mostly display-agnostic. TV manufacturers simply must ensure that their receivers are capable of displaying the content.

3D’s success in theaters is obvious, and it suits Hollywood and the CE industry to drive viewing into the home, FutureSource said. Active-shutter viewing looks set to become the de facto standard for viewing recorded media, while passive-polarization seems to be the path for broadcasters, who have limited bandwidth. Free terrestrial 3D broadcasts are three years away, the firm said. A 3D chip-set adds only $20 to the price of a TV, said John Bird, FutureSource principal consultant, and the premium will soon fall to zero, he said.

More perplexing in the short-term will be incompatibility among glasses for 3D displays, FutureSource said. There’s no standard for active-shutter glasses, which need a response time to match the screen’s display-rate -- which varies by manufacturer and display-type. So, spectacles for a Sony 3D won’t work with the Panasonic TV next door, said Bill Foster, FutureSource senior technology consultant.

But, the CEA hopes to develop standards that will make it easier for third-party manufacturers to provide glasses, Foster said. One major manufacturer already is testing multi-standard glasses that will be sold as an accessory, Foster said, declining to identify the company. There will be designer glasses, like designer sunglasses, and prescription-lens glasses too, he said.

"This is an accessory opportunity,” chimed in FutureSource’s Bottoms. “The CE industry is now very good at accessorizing. Shutter glasses currently cost between $50 and $100 but we expect that to fall to around $25. Bundling just one pair with a 3D TV may be a good strategy. Most people will be using the set mainly for 2D, but they will be able to give 3D a try and then buy more glasses if they like what they see,” Bottoms said.

Although cinemas use rechargeable batteries that can be refreshed between shows while the glasses are cleaned, button-cell batteries are better for the home because they only switch on when the infrared or Bluetooth control signal from a TV is detected, FutureSource said. So, the batteries are good for 250 to 300 hours of viewing, FutureSource said.