HP Devises ‘Triple-Wide’ 1080p 3D Format For Live Sports

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Hewlett-Packard has been a big role player “behind the scenes” in such massive 3D projects as Avatar, but wants to do more to promote better live 3D sports telecasts and other 3D content, Phil McKinney, chief technology officer in HP’s Personal Systems Group, told the DisplaySearch Emerging Technologies Conference Thursday. The company has devised an ultra-widescreen 3D format in full HD that it’s willing to license to CE and media companies, McKinney said.

HP has partnered the last three years with the NBA to experiment with shooting the NBA All-Star Game in 3D. Over the course of the tests, HP and the NBA have learned that excessive “camera movement” is the nemesis of live 3D sports, McKinney said. “The more camera movement, the more adjustments are needed for ocular distances and focals, causing what they refer to in the industry as brain shear,” he said. “The brain literally can’t process the constant changing of the focals, and so therefore people find it very uncomfortable."

At HP, in the ultimate effort to avoid camera movements at all, “we're moving toward a model” that captures more and more live 3D sports through “a fixed camera,” McKinney said. “By not moving the camera, I can recreate the experience” of being at a live sports event, he said. “You literally move the head as you watch the experience happen,” just as if being a spectator at the arena, he said.

During his presentation, McKinney showed a photograph of a prototype camera rig HP had built to capture what it calls “Triple-Wide HD 3D.” It’s the first time HP has shown the prototype publicly, he said. What results on screen are three sets of images, each beaming full 1080p video to both left and right eyes, but “stitched together” width-wise to create “a seamless video experience,” he said. The aim is to capture “as much information as possible” in an ultra-widescreen format. He showed a 2D photo rendering of an image captured by the rig at an NBA Summer League event two weeks ago in Las Vegas. “You can literally see end to end the entire length of the court,” he said. “Imagine that now in 3D."

HP typically projects the image onto a screen 20 feet tall by 60 feet wide when it shows such footage to selective audiences, he said. “When we talk about immersive, we think big,” he said. “This is not about the inches you fit on your wall in the living room. It’s how do you take advantage of these display technologies in this new form of being able to capture this content to create totally new kinds of experiences."

Lack of “network bandwidth” is the “biggest constraint” in beaming Triple-Wide Full HD 3D images to a display, he said. “Being able to move those bits around, capturing it off the camera and pumping it to a display -- that’s where the biggest constraints are happening when you start getting into these really large immersive displays."

When asked if HP plans to license Triple-Wide HD 3D to CE makers and content companies, McKinney said it’s HP policy not to “talk about future products.” But, he added, “you can clearly understand that we are committed to 3D across a wide range of platforms. The research that we do on large immersive displays for some pretty big customers is what will drive the trickle-down effect of bringing those technologies into consumer and commercial widely available types of platforms.” There are “media companies that are interested in licensing the triple-wide work that we're doing, and we've very open to that. It’s open for licensing.”