In among the expected crop of tablets, TVs, cameras and smartphones at IFA, Sony has unveiled its most stunningly bonkers product of all: the HMZ-T1 Personal 3D Viewer. Cramming two tiny 0.7in OLED screens into a headset that looks straight off the set of Star Trek, the HMZ-T1 delivers Full HD in three dimensions to an audience of just one.

If the photograph above suggests that these poor people are having a little trouble getting the device to fit just right, well, that’s because it’s a pretty bulky affair. With the visor extending so far in front of your face, the HMZ-T1 is unwieldy, even with the plastic headband properly fitted (see the chap at the far end of the row in the picture). The integrated headphones slide back and forth and rotate around, but we still had some trouble getting them just so on our, admittedly chunky, head.

Once you’ve got the HMZ-T1 on, you just have to adjust the focus sliders to bring the 3D image into crisp relief. A variety of video and audio options can also be adjusted in a heads-up display, with the directional keypad on the headset’s underside making it easy to navigate.

Once it’s configured, the image quality is staggeringly good: colours are rich and saturated, and the inky blacks of the OLED technology give images immense solidity. Once the picture snaps into focus, the sense of scale is unnerving: it feels like viewing a sizable 100in+ projection screen. The 3D effect is impressively free from any crosstalk artefacts, too. Even the compact headphones deliver fine sound quality.

But if you thought those active-shutter glasses for your 3D TV were expensive, we suspect the HMZ-T1’s use of OLED (that’s organic LED panels, if you were wondering) means we’re looking at a four (or even five?) figure sum. Funnily enough, Sony made no mention of pricing or a release date, so currently these 3D goggles are as elusive as they are crazy-looking.

UPDATE 2/09: It looks like our fears of massive four figure price-tags were unfounded. With our Sony contacts mentioning a suggested retail price in Japan that equates to nearer £800, the HMZ-T1’s aren’t quite as out there as you might expect.

So, if you’re sick of being forced to watch Eastenders with your other half (and you’d pay any price to squeeze in a quick round of Modern Warfare 2 while the missus isn’t looking), then maybe it’s time you got saving those pennies.

]]> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/09/01/sony-hmz-t1-personal-3d-viewer-review-first-look/feed/ 3 http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/02/14/lg-optimus-pad-review-first-look/ http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/02/14/lg-optimus-pad-review-first-look/#comments Mon, 14 Feb 2011 18:13:08 +0000 Jonathan Bray http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/?p=33313
Along with its spectacularly ambitious 3D smartphone, LG managed to unleash another new device today – the LG Optimus Pad. This 8.9in tablet represents LG’s first foray into the tablet space and it makes almost as big a splash as its little brother, packing in 3D features alongside the expected roll call of features.

Before you get too excited, though, it doesn’t have a parallax barrier 3D screen like the Optimus 3D. In fact, the display is a standard capacitive TFT touchscreen, measuring 8.9in from corner to corner and with a resolution of 1,280 x 768. It’s a perfectly good display too.

The Optimus Pad’s 3D features are instead limited to a 3D camera, which is still a pretty unusual feature. Flip it over and you’ll see a pair of lenses, each with its own 5-megapixel sensor behind it, and this arrangement allows you to shoot 3D video (not in HD), 3D stills, and 2D video at up to 720p. For playback, the Pad sports an HDMI 1.4 port so you can hook it up to a compatible 3D TV, and as with the Optimus 3D, there’s also the option to upload to YouTube 3D.

Design wise, this tablet is a bit on the dull side. It feels well made, it’s slim at 12.8mm and light at 630g, but there’s nothing about  it (aside from that pair of gleaming, black beady 3D eyes) that will draw looks at a conference or in a meeting. An inch-wide strip of aluminium running between the two cameras and across the back of the pad like a big, silver tongue, doesn’t really lift it either.

Its 8.9in screen size, however, is a good idea, striking a nice compromise between usability and readability – hold the Optimus Pad in portrait mode, and your thumbs will comfortably reach the centre of the on-screen keyboard.

And its vital statistics help it keep up with the Joneses too. As with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, the Optimus Tab runs on Google’s dedicated tablet operating system, Android 3 (aka Honeycomb), and in keeping with its specifications it ran pretty smoothly.

The screen was responsive, the screen rights itself quickly when you rotate between portrait and landscape, and Honeycomb’s multiple desktops and menus whizzed by with all the slippery smoothness of bar of soap at the bottom of the shower cubicle. Those specifications, by the way, comprise a 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 processor, 32GB of storage, 802.11n Wi-Fi and 3G.

We’re less convinced by the LG Optimus Pad than we are by the Optimus 3D, simply because it offers only half the 3D features, yet those features will inevitably mean extra cost. Because of that, we can only see it appealing to those who’ve already invested in a 3D TV, or an Nvidia 3D Vision-equipped PC and monitor. It’s a perfectly sound tablet otherwise, just one with a rather niche appeal.

And the big surprise: it actually works quite well. I say that with the one obvious caveat that I’ve only seen the work done via the demo video, not with a DVD or Blu-ray movie of my own choosing, but when I spoke to a Sony product manager on the stand he claimed he and his wife watched the whole of Iron Man on the 16in display, “live” in 3D.

To see for yourself – kind of – what this brief clip below.

This live encoding is only possible, Sony claims, due to the combination of Intel’s latest Core i5/i7 processors, top-end Nvidia graphics and a 240Hz screen – and it also claims it’s unique to offer the ability to convert Full HD content from 2D to 3D on the fly. Certainly it’s the only such laptop I’m aware of.

Existing owners of Nvidia 3D systems may be wondering where the transmitters are to connect with the active 3D glasses; that is, the powered kind of glasses rather than the passive kind. The answer is that they’re embedded into the lid.

It’s a neat solution in one way – there’s no dongle to worry about – but the compromise is a lid that’s near enough 1cm thick. Then again, you aren’t going to be carrying the F Series around with you much anyway. It’s luggable rather than portable at 3.1kg, and it’s a big feller too; according to Sony’s stats, 45mm at its thickest point.

The styling is certainly bold. A glossy black finish (which, predictably, picks up fingerprints very easily) is underlined by the thick plastic wrist rest which stands out a millimetre or so from the main chassis.

Ignoring its 3D abilities for a moment, the 16in screen looks impressive in 2D too. It’s sharp, vibrant and the high resolution means you can pack in a huge amount of detail too.

The F Series is already available with a number of different specifications, so you can pack in as much performance as you can afford – all the way up to a quad-core Core i7-740QM with 8GB of memory and Nvidia GeForce GT 425M graphics.

We look forward to giving the F Series a proper run-out in our Labs as soon as Sony can send a full production model to us.

It’s the most important consideration when it comes to filming in 3D: what types of production does the technology really suit? The huge vistas of Avatar used the 3D effect better than any film we’ve seen so far, but can shots still look good when scaled down to less epic proportions? Buzz Hays believes it may be something far smaller scale than cinema that eventually shows what 3D can achieve.

Filming on a hand-held budget

If we move way down the scale from Avatar towards smaller productions, one technique crops up more and more. The hand-held style – as used in Cloverfield (above) and the Bourne films, and increasingly aped by lower-budget productions - just doesn’t work well in 3D. Buzz calls it “very much a 2D convention”, which goes where the action goes, keeping the wobbles and shakes intact. That supposedly immerses the viewer, but when combined with 3D it ratchets that motion up several notches.

“Say you’re riding a bicycle down a very bumpy mountain road. Your bicycle’s going to be juddering up and down, but your eyes stay much flatter, while your visual cortex is making a lot of corrections. We never see the world in that juddering way unless we’re subjected to some very erratic motion. So to then shoot an image like that and stick it into the head of somebody? That’s going to make people sick. We’re happy to help people figure out a way to shoot 3D like that, but it does not work out like they think – it doesn’t give a scene that level of excitement, it just makes people nauseous.”

Buzz gave the example of a US TV show that’s shot on the high seas, where the makers suggested filming in 3D to enhance the excitement. “I’m thinking hang on… if we’re standing on that boat any one of us would be throwing up over the rail after two seconds, and you want to recreate that in my living room? Certain situations are just very much 2D-centric.”

It’s not impossible to create a 3D scene using the hand-held approach, but for a watchable experience the level of motion has to be toned down. As Buzz says, “if you don’t want to change the style of your film then don’t shoot it in 3D. Once you use a Steadicam and smooth it out a bit, it’s no longer the film you were trying to make.”

3D in the home

One common complaint of 3D in cinemas (as made on this very site) is that the glasses make things too dark to fully appreciate the picture. Buzz agreed, but had more to say.

“You do need to compensate for the fact that you’re losing at least a full stop of light to each camera. But this is an issue unique to cinema; 3D television has the opposite problem. You have a luminance of 17fL* for a 2D cinema projection, yet we have 35fL in a 3D television, so we typically have to adjust these things for each particular style of display.”

Whether this brighter picture makes home 3D more palatable to a sceptical public remains to be seen, but it’s at least one hurdle cleared. The other is getting different types of content made in 3D, at a time when the blockbuster is the clear king.

“Live action 3D, especially in dramas, is a very new concept to a lot of people, and a lot of studios just haven’t been willing to go there yet – they figure it has to be the big tentpole, the big visual effects, the big action picture. That’s changing, and will change more with 3D television – not everything has to be the big blockbuster event.”

We’ve already seen Sky launch its 3D channel in the UK, initially for pubs and bars with the necessary 3D Ready projectors, but eventually making its way into homes. By now Sky has plenty of practice with sports, but the 3D team has also experimented with programmes intended for Sky Arts and even news. Could it be the more intimate productions that really harness the effect?

“There’s a truth to a 3D image that we will never get from 2D,” explained Buzz, “especially if you look at news photography. When we photograph war in 2D, it’s interpretation; regardless of how the filmmaker’s trying to present the facts, it’s a filter. Once you present the same images in 3D there’s a very visceral response to it, very truthful and honest, to the point where I think there’s a certain responsibility now with filmmaking, that you have to regard the fact that you’re about to show people something very real.”

That may sound surprising to those of us who see 3D purely as a way into fantasy worlds full of blue catpeople, but it’s being taken seriously in some quarters already.

“We had a situation in Beowulf, where the ratings board didn’t want to give the film a final rating until they actually saw certain objectionable scenes in 3D because they thought they might be more graphic.”

The DIY future of 3D

While Bob Zemeckis and James Cameron have been the ones putting the high-profile 3D productions out there for the world to see – and to criticise – Buzz sees the future as more in the hands of people with less money and more creativity.

“There’s already the possibility, especially in the CG world, for people to get involved in 3D. There’s a little group who did a film for a Bjork song called Wanderlust, it was shot by a duo called Encyclopedia Pictura in New York. They didn’t know the first thing about 3D. They researched it, they talked to [stereoscopic guru] Lenny Lipton, they talked to a bunch of people, they built their own camera rig, they shot this thing and it’s great. They knew nothing and it cost them almost nothing. If people have the wherewithal to figure it out they’re going to do some amazing stuff.”

People like us? People at home with everyday jobs, no specialist knowledge and nothing but a camera and some imagination?

“It will become more accessible, especially as consumer-grade cameras come out. We already have a couple of still camera systems right now that can shoot 3D, the Sony NEX series can shoot 3D panoramas.” [Panasonic has since announced the HDC-SDT750 3D camcorder, right.]

“Once you put 3D cameras into the hands of general consumers, that’s when we’ll start to see amazing things. I am convinced that the best 3D we’ll see is going to come completely out of leftfield.”

Read more:
Why we can’t ditch 3D glasses just yet.
Why bad 3D, not 3D glasses, is what gives you a headache.
From the Pole to Pandora: the shaky progress of modern 3D.
Why 3D and modern filmmaking techniques don’t mix.

Yet, Toy Story 3 is categorically the last film I will ever pay extra money for to watch in 3D. My local Odeon was showing a 3D print of Toy Story at half-past six and the 2D version two hours later: I’ve concluded I’d have gladly waited.

Why? Aside from the 3D surcharge imposed by the cinemas and the ear-chaffing discomfort of the 3D glasses, there’s another problem: I can’t see my popcorn.

3D glasses, being polarised, are darker than not wearing glasses. The problem is that they’re so much darker they affect the image quality of the film.

Let’s do a little, vaguely scientific test. With my DSLR set on aperture-priority mode, I pointed it at a wall and pressed the shutter halfway to have it work as a kind of light meter. To get a good exposure, my camera told me, it would fire the shutter for 1/125th of a second.

Then, I held my 3D Glasses over the lens and did the same thing. This time it metered and told me it would fire the shutter at 1/50th of a second to get the same exposure. That’s less than half as fast. Photographically, that means that my 3D glasses absorb one and a quarter stops of light. In real-world terms that means my glasses make anything I look at – a film screen, for instance – less than half as bright as it would be if I was using the naked eye.

I’m not alone in this: Christopher Nolan, who directed the (thankfully non-3D) Dark Knight, said, “on an experiential level, I find the dimness of the (3D) image extremely alienating.”

When I flicked my 3D glasses away from my face during Toy Story 3 I saw a bright, vibrant image that did justice to the artists’ vision. With the glasses on, I lost track of details in dark scenes. Films shouldn’t be hard to watch, you shouldn’t need to squint, and you certainly shouldn’t come away with an experience any less than the director and photography crew wanted just because the current vogue is for 3D effects.

I wouldn’t say Toy Story 3 was ruined because it was in 3D. I still loved it, I recommend it whole-heartedly and if it doesn’t win an Oscar this year I’ll eat a pair of 3D glasses. But they’ll be the last pair I’ll ever own.

You can read the full-length version of this blog here.

To be done well, a 3D film really needs to be 3D from the outset, as the tools and techniques that work in three dimensions are very different to those most cinematographers have grown used to. In fact, some even require a step back in time to a more artistic age of cinema, as Buzz Hays explained.

Depth of field

Take depth of field, for example. It’s a staple of modern films, commonly used to direct the viewer’s eyes to the key point of the screen, guiding us through the scene as the director intended. Yet it’s an effect that simply doesn’t work in 3D. To demonstrate, Buzz showed us a 3D still from the movie Monster House, in which a character stands with his arm outstretched towards the camera. Only his face is in focus.

“Note where your eyes take you when this shot hits the screen,” began Buzz. “Cinematographers are trained in the art of this particular technique, so they know exactly where to look, but I’m going to hazard a guess that you looked at his hand first?” He was right. Despite the lack of focus on anything but the face, the hand drew the attention.

“Typically, when you look at 3D, whether it’s the real world or a movie, you tend to look at whatever’s closest to you. In 2D depth of field works well to direct your eye to the main character’s face, but in 3D it creates a disconnect, because there’s no logical reason why the world is out of focus. It creates visual confusion, and this could be one of those moments where the viewer is pulled out of the story because he’s not quite sure where to look.”

He then replaced the image with the same shot, all in focus. “Now your eyes will still go to his hand first, but as you wander the frame [and it’s in focus] it takes the curse off.” And it did.

Lighting

With depth of field less effective, cinematographers need to use other methods of directing the viewer’s eye. For inspiration they should look back through the decades, to a time when lighting was more prominent tool in a cinematographer’s box.

“When you think about some of the world’s greatest cinematographers of yore, like Greg Toland who shot Citizen Kane for Orson Welles, they used very deep-focus photography. Every aspect of the image was in focus, so instead they used lighting to direct the eye, and shadow to sculpt objects. [There's a fascinating piece by Toland here.] We’re starting to find with filmmakers working in 3D, that it is like theatre. In theatre we can’t simulate out of focus, so we use lighting to direct the eye – and we’re starting to lean back towards that method.”

Games designers have long used lighting to guide the player through increasingly complex levels, partly because depth of field effects have only recently become feasible using consumer graphics cards. Filmmakers will also have to relearn these more traditional techniques, which is something Buzz is all for. The problem is that many in the industry today have become tied to depth of field as a tool to the point where they don’t even consider other methods.

“A lot of the younger filmmakers I’ve talked to say, ‘I can’t lose my use of depth of field because that’s how I direct the eye in the frame’. It’s because it’s the only way they know how to direct the eye. A lot of them have never tried anything else because it [depth of field] has been around since they started in cinema.”

As an interesting aside, Alfred Hitchcock was no stranger to 3D, having filmed the 1954 classic Dial M For Murder using a stereoscopic camera rig. For one scene he wanted a close-up of a finger dialling the titular M on a rotary dial telephone, but the gigantic rig just couldn’t get close enough to capture the effect at such a small scale. Hitchcock’s solution? To build a huge wooden telephone (right) and a wooden finger to dial it with. By the time the film was released it played mostly in 2D, as the short 1950s 3D craze had already fizzled out.

Editing

A move towards the methods of theatre should have another side benefit for viewers tiring of the ever-faster editing that seems to be plaguing modern cinema.

“You tend to involve an audience in a much deeper way if the performance just unfolds. If you have a really powerful, great actor giving a performance, when you watch that in 3D, especially from a given camera position, you feel that performance coming through as if you’re sitting right there in a theatre. As we start to edit around that, we start to lose the sense of the power of the performance.”

These days many directors seem to assume the viewer has a short attention span and requires fast editing to retain the sense of involvement in a scene, but that shouldn’t be the case with 3D.

“A number of visual scientists that have looked at 3D over the past ten to fifteen years have commented on this idea that when you look at a still 3D image, your brain tends to do the editing for you.”

“Working in filmmaking we use editing as a principal technique for driving the story forward, to ellipse time and all sorts of things. But presented with a 3D image your eye tends to wander. A lot of filmmakers will find that as they introduce new environments and characters, they might actually open up the pacing of the edit just a little bit to let the eye wander before they cut to the action. Just like in comedy you don’t want to step on the laugh, here you want to give the viewer the chance to acclimatise to the environment before you jump in with the action.”

As an example of filmmakers experimenting with this idea, we can look back to two 3D movies which used different approaches.

“G-Force was about 84 minutes, I believe, and we had 1,800 shots in the movie. Yet Beowulf, which was over two hours long, had only 840 shots. [Director] Bob Zemeckis realised that using camera motion helped tell the story rather than lots of cutting. It was more conducive to telling the story in 3D, and letting the action play out on camera versus creating a performance in edit.”

3D to enhance story

Zemeckis also used other ways to experiment with 3D, not all of which you may have noticed while watching the film.

“We had a situation in Beowulf, where we had a discussion with Bob about using 3D from a storytelling perspective. Because the film involves characters in constant shifting power, Bob made it so as people were losing their power, they’d actually start to lose some of their dimension. Conversely those who were gaining power started to become more realistic in dimension. It was a very subtle use of 3D in terms of telling the story.”

Too subtle for most to notice, but an interesting approach nonetheless, and similar to one which Hitchcock has been known to use. Of Dial M For Murder, the director once told an interviewer, “We did an interesting colour experiment with Grace Kelly’s clothing. I dressed her in very gay and bright colors at the beginning of the picture, and as the plot thickened, her clothes became gradually more somber.”

The old classics had directors looking for ways to add to the story of a film, and hopefully 3D will have them experimenting all over again.

“To us 3D technology should support the storytelling, it shouldn’t be the story,” said Buzz. As another studio slaps a headline-grabbing 3D conversion on another perfectly good 2D film, few could argue with those words.

Storm Trooper image courtesy of pasukaru76.

As senior producer of 3D Stereoscopic Feature Films for Sony Pictures Imageworks for more than five years, Buzz Hays has been there for the peaks and troughs involved in getting 3D cinema into the mainstream. Over the course of an afternoon he led us through many aspects of 3D, but for this blog I’ve collated his experiences of working on various films into one timeline. It begins a mere six years ago on a train, and ends with the revelation that Avatar was, in some respects, a disappointment…

2004 – The Polar Express

“The Polar Express was our very first project [at Imageworks] in 3D, with Robert Zemeckis directing. Only six years ago there were very few public venues that could show 3D – in this case I believe the number was about 84 theatres in the entire world. That’s a fairly limited release for a picture like that, but it proved to be quite successful for a number of reasons, not least of which was that Jeffrey Katzenburg credits Polar Express as the film where he really came to the conclusion that 3D was a logical extension of cinematography and wanted to take Dreamworks Animation into that.”

2006 – Monster House, Open Season

“The first digital cinema release in 3D was a Disney film called Chicken Little, and they had a whopping 86 screens, something like that. By the time we got to Monster House digital cinema had taken hold, and we had 172 theatres that could show 3D, still not a vast number but the studio felt it was enough to actually make the effort worthwhile.

“In the same year we actually released Open Season as a 3D film – interestingly, the film was actually in the can ready to be released, at which time they decided it should be a 3D movie. So we had to go back into the archives, get all the assets out and then recreate the entire film in 3D in a three-month schedule. It was built in a computer, it’s a totally CG movie, so it was a relatively straightforward exercise – it’s what we call a native version, it’s not a conversion. And it was overlapping Monster House, so we were actually working on two 3D films at the same time. Monster House proved to be quite successful. It was made for IMAX, which had about 90 screens worldwide.”

2007 – Beowulf

“Up to this point, it was mostly family films using 3D, and mostly 88 minutes or under. Beowulf was the first picture for an older audience that was nearly two hours long. We had concerns because conventional wisdom at the time was that children had an easier time looking at 3D that might perhaps be uncomfortable to look at, and adults had a harder time with it. That’s when we really started looking into the physiology side of it for the first time. How do we see 3D at all? Why does it work sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t?

“We had a director in this case, Bob Zemeckis, who wanted a really deep film, but he wanted a story told in three dimensions. Yet the two-hour movie was a big concern for us. We had a ten-month schedule to fine-tune things, and it was only after Beowulf that we realised that over the course of those last three years, we’d worked with hundreds of visual effects artists who’d worked with 3D all day every day for a year or two at a time, and we didn’t have a single health problem.

“A mere year after Open Season, when Beowulf released we had 1,100 screens, so suddenly it was a realistic number to get a lot of people to see the picture. That’s when the floodgates really started to open in terms of 3D production. We had a condundrum, though: in 2007 there were very few 3D releases, so we had no opportunity to show a 3D trailer for the film; all we could do was tell people it was 3D.”

2009 – Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, G-Force

“Jonas Brothers was our first live-action experience, and proved to be a very interesting one – not least because my ears were ringing for about six weeks afterwards because the shoot was just girls screaming for ten hours. It was unbelievable. Working with the live footage – and this might surprise you – we thought, wouldn’t it be great if the cameras and images actually lined up? Turns out they didn’t very well at all.

“Technology’s getting better, but these are hard situations to shoot. Basically when we’re shooting with the left and right-eye camera the differences between the two were so vast in some cases it looked like the two eyes were shot on two different days, so the amount of work we had to do in post was frightening. There’s a current filming philosophy to just get it close and fix it in post – which they don’t have to do, we do. We realised then how important it is to start working with camera rig manufacturers to make the camera systems better, so that the post-production process is easier.

“With G-Force, they’d experimented with the idea of doing a 3D movie, then decided not to for a variety of reasons, and mid-way through the shoot – on 35mm film in 2D – they decided, yes indeed, we are making it a 3D movie. So this was our first foray into this notion of converting 2D into 3D. Basically no one had done it – there had been The Nightmare Before Christmas which was stylised with no people in it, and a few IMAX movies – but this was the first time we’d really been confronted with how to convert material.

“We had the luxury of only having to worry about the background photographic plates they’d shot of people and buildings because the main characters in the movie are generated by computer. So, we came up with the tools and techniques to derive depth out of the photographic elements and put them into a 3D environment, in this case Maya, then added the CG characters and rendered the whole thing in 3D. So it was really a hybrid approach.”

2010 – Alice in Wonderland, Avatar

“Alice in Wonderland was similar, although a 180-degree opposite approach: the actors had been photographed against a green screen, and the environments were created in 3D. Despite the various press you’ve been reading about the pictures that have recently been converted, it actually can be done very well, it’s just time-consuming and very expensive.

“As for theatres, things today are both better and worse. Think back to 2007, around Beowulf we had the luxury of a release window for as long as the film needed – six or eight weeks was a reasonable amount of time for a 3D picture to stay in cinemas. Flash forward to now and Alice in Wonderland, the release window had collapsed to just shy of two weeks because of the number of 3D releases and the fact that the theatres hadn’t kept up with the number of installations they had committed to. Avatar was supposed to be the big pivotal film where 3D would explode and we’d have a zillion theatres, but as it turned out it barely had 4,500 or so, maybe 5,000. We were expecting more than 6,000.

“We’re getting past the point where mass audiences are seeing this as a novelty, and it’s hopefully just becoming another way people watch films. So we’re starting to move into a territory that’s not just the blockbusters, not just the animated films, but getting back to traditional storytelling. Over the next year or two we’re going to see some very interesting motion pictures and television programmes in 3D.”

3D is an ever-evolving process, which is why the effect can be such a hit-and-miss affair. But those who insist 3D glasses give them headaches are a little wide of the mark, according to the man who trains the filmmaking pros.

“It’s not the technology’s fault, it’s really the content that can cause these problems,” explains Buzz Hays. “The more care taken when making the content, the better off everyone’s going to be. My mantra is that it’s easy to make 3D but it’s hard to make it good – and by ‘good’ I mean taking care to make sure that this isn’t going to cause eyestrain.”

There are several common mistakes that can cause discomfort, and easy ways for that to be reduced, yet they’re only just being learned and put into regular use.

Interaxial distance

The interaxial, or the distance between the two cameras, controls the overall depth of the 3D effect. Objects will appear closer or further away but they won’t change in size, so it’s important not to increase the interaxial distance too much. Filmmakers are gradually gaining experience with what types of scene work with different depths of 3D, and Buzz was keen to point out that framing a scene for 3D has similarities to composition for still photographers.

“When it comes to composing in 3D… by using the heads of the audience [in a U2 concert clip] or the ground plane, or some continuous sense of depth in the shot, it holds the shot together. One of the complaints people sometimes have about 3D is that it feels like a cardboard cutout: that there’s a cardboard cutout, then some space and then another cardboard cutout. By using a careful choice of interaxial spacing, and also by having something in the frame like the ground plane, or smoke or atmosphere or something, then you can start to hold the shot together.”

Convergence

Our eyes converge inward as we look at an object moving towards us. In 3D it’s essentially the same thing: we converge (or “toe-in”) the angle of the left and right cameras, and this alters the particular 3D plane to which our focus is drawn. Objects in front of the convergence point appear to be coming out at us, while objects behind do the opposite. Care needs to be taken, however, particularly when fast cutting is used.

“There’s a situation where every time we cut to a new shot, the subject of interest is at a slightly different distance from us,” explained Buzz, demonstrating a rapidly cut clip of two people at different convergence points. “What’s happening is on every single cut, your eyes are making an adjustment to depth – you’re trying to find that object. It’s a very subtle distance, it’s not a great distance, but that’s what you’re feeling in your eye muscles as you’re trying to work to catch up with the shot. That’s called the vergence-accommodation conflict.”

“The way we make it much easier to look at is by using convergence in post-production. In that same sequence I adjust the convergence in post [production] to massage the depth. Now your eyes are making the adjustment once in the very first shot, and from that point on they don’t have to adjust again. It’s very subtle but if you don’t do it, it’s the difference between a comfortable experience and a splitting headache after 90 minutes.”

What filmmakers are now learning is that trying to control the convergence during filmmaking is, as Buzz bluntly puts it, “a waste of time”. As cuts are made and scenes are shifted around, it’s difficult to know exactly what shot will follow another, so trying to predict it all is futile.

“It’s far better to find the comfortable place to put the convergence level during shooting, then adjust it in post-production once the edit is finished – that ultimately makes the difference between good and bad 3D.”

Divergence

The opposite of convergence is divergence, and just as our eyes can only converge to a certain point before we go cross-eyed, so they can only diverge to parallel. Overuse of divergence can cause big problems.

“Typically, when we look at an object in the world our eyes are either parallel if it’s at distance, or they’re converged inwards for objects that are closer,” continued Buzz. “There’s a condition that can be created unintentionally where your eyes are forced to rotate outward in order to fuse this image – which frankly only works if you’re a horse or a goldfish, and they don’t buy movie tickets.”

At this point Buzz put a scene on the screen in front of us and had us don our specs. A figure at the back of the image was simply impossible to bring into focus, and even trying was as uncomfortable as you’d expect. Removing the glasses showed why: the left and right views of the figure were several feet apart on the big screen.

“Divergence occurs based on the size of screen you’re using. You might make a neat adjustment [during filming] so it looks great on a monitor, but when you scale it up to 40ft it hurts like heck. Experienced stereographers will be able to avoid it, but some low-budget 3D films have been filled with divergence, as they’ve made the cardinal mistake of falling in love with the image on a video monitor when it was really intended for a cinema display. They’re dialling the depth to within an inch of its life and getting everything they wanted on the small monitor, so their camera settings are out of whack. It can’t be fixed in post – unless you just abandon [the image for] one eye and convert 3D from the other.”

These were just a few of the common faults covered in our brief time with Buzz, and it was clear from his honesty about current 3D’s shortcomings that there really isn’t a true 3D expert in existence. The people teaching it are still learning while they go, and doing their best to pass that knowledge on. The hope is that viewers will benefit from gradually better 3D – and, hopefully, fewer headaches.

Goldfish image courtesy of bensonkua. Convergence diagram courtesy of Panasonic.

The question always comes up and rarely gets answered properly, so to hear such a measured dismantling of glasses-less 3D was illuminating. But then, Buzz Hays has been pioneering and improving the art of creating 3D for five years, so when he says we’ll be sticking with the glasses for a while yet, you tend to listen.

The main reason 3D glasses will be around for the foreseeable future is that autostereoscopic displays – those which work without the need for glasses – face problems that simply can’t be surmounted with current technology. I’ll let Buzz explain.

“The big issue is with the resolution of the source material itself. In order for it to be an image that even approximates something like high-def we have to be at least four times the resolution we have right now. So it’s impractical at this point.”

He’s talking about the way current 3D works, in that the left and right eyes’ images both need to be projected and polarised in opposite directions to be combined in your brain – so the picture you see in the cinema is half the resolution it could be. Taking away the glasses means that effect just gets worse. Buzz continues:

“Most of the [autostereoscopic] systems out there require – instead of just the left and right eye view – multiple views, odd numbers such as nine or 13 or, in some cases I’ve seen, up to 27 views. Firstly, somebody has to create all the views, but secondly, if you take a high-def image and you divide the width of the screen by nine then you’ve already cut your resolution by nine, so the image is roughly a tenth of the original resolution.”

“That’s tiny. That’s like a QuickTime movie you’d put in an email. Most self-respecting film makers won’t let their work be so degraded.”

Of course, as Buzz pointed out at the start of his presentation, at CES 2009 the pronouncements were that 3D TV would hit homes within three to five years, yet they’re already beginning to appear within a single year. The pace of progress just can’t be predicted, so who knows when we’ll be able to ditch the specs? “Eventually we’ll get there,” he assured us, “but the glasses really shouldn’t be an impediment.”

I agree with him on that one: if you’re stubborn enough to avoid 3D because the glasses make you look silly, or because you think it’s an effort you shouldn’t have to endure, you’re missing out on what can be a tremendous experience. Kids see the glasses as part of the experience, part of the fun; is it really so hard to buy into that?

“Grown-ups seem to have a problem with the glasses thing,” said Buzz. “When people are adamant, ‘I’d never watch a movie wearing glasses,’ I’m always like [points to his own glasses] ‘Why not? I do it all the time.’”

If that kind of argument doesn’t sway you, sitting in a 3D film without glasses just might. “With most of the early autostereoscopic displays, you can’t move your head. It’s perfect for a date movie, right? Imagine it: you sit here, she sits here, now neither of you move for two hours!”

Sounds almost as romantic as a back-row fumble with the glasses on…

Oh, and just to ramp up the excitement, I’ll take you through my top seven in reverse order.

7. Location Awareness with LED Visible Lighting

This is one of those ideas whose appeal lies in its sheer simplicity. In short, it’s a system that warns you when you’re too close to a car in front – or when a car is too close behind you. The clever part is that it works out the distances involved by triangulating the beams from LED headlights and tail-lights.

It’s a fast system, and accurate – the showcase stand included a live demo with some toy cars, tracking their locations in real time to a precision of under an inch. It can even track multiple cars at once.

Sadly, there’s one big catch. Just watching regular headlights is apparently too imprecise, so Intel’s system requires them to pulse on and off at a rather alarming 20MHz. The effect is invisible to the human eye – it would need to be about half a million times slower for you to see it – so it doesn’t directly affect safety. But it does mean the system is effectively useless until everybody in the world fits a 20MHz modulator to their headlights. That’s a pretty tough sell, especially for a benefit that you don’t actually experience yourself (having your headlights adjusted only helps other people to see you, not vice versa).

It’s also worth noting that this isn’t actually a problem that many people would admit to. Reverse parking, yes, that’s an area where some electronic guidance can be very helpful. But when you’re out on the open road, one would hope you can detect the cars around you without the aid of a high-tech sensor. Still, it’s a fun demo.

6. Energy-Efficient, Scalable I/O

It’s a bit of a mouthful, but EESIO is another simple idea. At present, the high-speed buses that ferry information around inside a PC can consume up to 10W before the system’s done a single calculation. For a low-power PC or notebook, that’s not small change; and as transport speeds ramp up, I/O power demands will continue to rise while other components become more energy-efficient. The likes of QPI and PCI Express could thus end up being among the most power-hungry parts of a system.

What’s the solution? Well, on Tuesday Mario Paniccia suggested Light Peak could be used as an internal high-speed bus – and the idea does have some merit. But converting every bit into laser light and back again is hardly an energy-efficient approach.

Enter EESIO, a technology which does away with all such back-and-forthing. It appears as an unobtrusive grid of contacts on the outside of a chip package, which can be connected, via a ribbon cable, to another EESIO-compatible chip. The two units can then communicate directly, without having to involve the motherboard at all. It’s a seamless way to link a CPU to a GPU, to a bank of DIMMs or even to another CPU in a multiprocessor system.

In truth, EESIO isn’t quite as straightforward as it sounds. You can’t simply hard-wire chips together, not least because they probably won’t be running at the same speed. The chips therefore require integrated EESIO controllers, and that incurs a certain cost in terms of complexity and power consumption. Happily, Intel engineers claim a 10Gb/sec EESIO link still requires only 10% of the power used by current internal buses.

Since EESIO requires support inside the CPU package, it will probably take a degree of investment to get it off the ground. Sooner or later, though, some sort of high-speed, low-power bus is going to be needed, and once EESIO is in place the overheads are attractively low.

5. Simple Energy Sensing

I don’t know about you, but every time I get an electricity bill I take a stiff drink, then solemnly determine that I must find a way to reduce my power consumption. Then I take another drink and somehow lose interest in the idea. The fact is, getting to grips with your energy usage is a difficult, boring project.

That’s where Simple Energy Sensing comes in. Simply plug the device into a socket and it’ll keep track of how much energy your various appliances are consuming, along with a running tally of your electricity bill.

Now hold on, you’re probably saying. That’s not innovative at all. Indeed, it’s not. What is innovative, and terrifically clever, is that it can identify individual appliances by their electrical signatures. For example, turning on a lightbulb causes a distinctive fluctuation on the power line, which the system can identify as a lightbulb-type pattern. Turning on a television produces a much more complex pattern, as its various components kick in at slightly different rates, which again can be recognised. The system can thus keep track not only of your total consumption, but of exactly which appliances are contributing to it at which times.

I must confess, at first I was sceptical as to whether this system could really distinguish between, say, a toaster and a hair-dryer. But the sampling resolution is extremely high, enabling it to catch tiny fluctuations lasting for a thousandth of a second or less, and the developers seem certain that this is more than sufficient to distinguish between the range of appliances in an average home.

Perhaps the cleverest bit is the interface. Yes, you can monitor your usage on a computer, as above, and see which appliances ought to be unplugged, replaced or used only in the dead of night when electricity is cheaper.

But Intel realises that only geeks will do that on a regular basis; so they’ve also put together a stylish tablet-type console that would look at home in any kitchen or hallway. Suddenly the idea goes from a nerdy proof of concept to an attractive lifestyle upgrade that could quickly pay for itself.

4. Oasis: Smart Computing on Everyday Surfaces

On the podcast, we recently commented that the idea of having a touchscreen computer in the kitchen is a nice one… but that it would immediately get covered in flour and grease. Intel’s Oasis project uses a projector and a 3D camera to turn your work-surface into a large, virtually indestructible tabletop touchscreen.

It’s a 3D camera because that allows Oasis to tell when your fingertip touches an icon, without getting confused when you simply move your hand above the surface. The shadows cast by your arms as you use the “screen” can be a little intrusive, but you can’t have everything.

And it gives Oasis an impressive ability to recognise not only fingertips but any sort of physical object. When Intel’s Beverley Harrison (the mastermind behind the system) placed a green pepper on the work-surface, a context menu automatically appeared next to it, enabling her to view recipes involving peppers or add peppers to her shopping list. Adding a piece of steak to the work-surface brought up a recipe for steak with green peppers, while setting down a tub of ice cream caused an automatic countdown to pop up, warning us against leaving it out of the freezer for too long.

These, of course, are just demonstrations. The system has huge potential beyond the kitchen, and to be honest the next challenge is probably working out what to make of it. The ability to work with physical objects is cute, but it doesn’t seem to open many doors: you can’t back up a pepper for later, or email some steak to a friend. But even if that part of the project is a dead-end, the combination of a 3D camera and a projected display could make Oasis an affordable and extremely robust alternative to large-scale touch-screen displays.

3. Wireless Energy Resonant Link

Call me a nerd, but the idea of domestic wireless power gets me excited – I love the idea that my phone could be charging whenever I’m at home, even while it’s in my pocket. Without power cables trailing everywhere my home would be a lot tidier, and it would be cleaner too as I wouldn’t have to remember to plug the Roomba in.

Intel’s latest breakthrough doesn’t make all of that a reality, but it’s a step in the right direction. Currently, near-field wireless power systems (such as you’d use in the home) typically work by generating a magnetic field which induces a current in a remote receptor. The problem is that the receptor has to be directly in front of the induction coil to get the benefit.

Intel’s new system, demonstrated to me by Josh Erickson, is able to sweep the “focus” of the induction coil across a wide area – without physically moving the coil – and automatically lock on to locations at which the energy is absorbed, indicating the presence of a receptor. This expands the usable scope to almost 180°, effectively turning wireless power from a directional technology into an ambient one – though if two devices are discovered at widely different locations the system can’t power them simultaneously but must pan between them.

Erickson explained that the system was currently able to send a charge of two watts over a distance of around four feet, which ought to be just about enough power to charge a mobile phone. For the time being, though, the size of the coils is a stumbling block: the coils in the demonstration each had a diameter of around nine inches, but if you were to shrink the receptor down to the size of a pocket device, it seems the induction coil would need to be several feet across.

Full disclosure: I’m not an expert in this field, so forgive me if I’ve got the terminology slightly wrong. But the basics of what Intel has achieved are easy to understand, and it’s clearly a very promising step.

2. Resilient Computing

Most processors are capable of running above their stock speeds. A 2.2GHz processor might in fact be able to run at 3GHz, but it’s deliberately throttled back to provide what Intel calls a “guardband” – a generous degree of tolerance that guarantees error-free performance even at high temperatures and heavy load.

The Resilient Computing project has no truck with guardbands. Their project statement declares that running CPUs at such cautious speeds “leaves performance and power on the table.” They run their chips at the very limits of their abilities, achieving an advertised 40% improvement in performance from the same execution cores.

Surely, you would think, this leads to horrifically unstable systems? Well, it probably would if these were ordinary desktop processors. But the team has modified them to detect when the execution pipeline has been unable to keep up with the overclocked core, and to cleanly resume processing at the next clock cycle. This eliminates the most common cause of overclocking-related failure, at the cost of a few wasted ticks.

In fact, “a few” is an understatement: a demonstrator showed me that a “1GHz” chip running at 1.4GHz was in fact losing more than three million clock cycles per second (it’s the meter at the top of the pile in the picture) to pipeline misses. But that still translates to an overall performance benefit of 39.7% with no loss of stability. Going the other way, it’s also possible to cut the power going into the CPU by as much as 20%, and use the same resilient logic to keep the system stable.

The thing I love about the resilient approach is that it simply makes more effective use of a capability that’s already there – much like the Turbo Boost technology in Core i5 and Core i7 processors. Since it gives such a large benefit, at such a low cost, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it appearing in real products sooner rather than later.

1. Single-chip Cloud Computing

In truth we’ve seen this project before, but it’s still my favourite of Intel’s current research projects. Remember how Larrabee was supposed to combine 32 x86 cores into one all-powerful parallel computing card? Well this project – informally referred to as Rock Creek – has 48 cores on a regular CPU die. And, unlike Larrabee – gosh, I seem to be saying that a lot lately – it actually works.

The difference in approach is simple. “The idea with Larrabee,” explained Intel’s Jason Howard, “is that all those cores were supposed to be fully cache coherent. And we said, that’s a stupid idea, because making that happen is almost harder than doing the actual computations.”

“So for this chip we manage cache coherency in software. Yes, there is an overhead, but it’s just a lot easier to do.”

In reality, the overhead seems very small: Mr Howard demonstrated multi-threaded benchmark scores scaling almost linearly as he permitted them to run on more and more cores.

Surprisingly, he revealed that the execution cores are based on the Pentium design – not the Pentium 4, but the “classic” Pentium, launched in 1993, shrunk down from the original 0.8µm process to 45nm. (Foolishly, I neglected to ask whether Rock Creek therefore suffers from the notorious FDIV bug.) The choice, he said was simply because the Pentium core can run more or less all modern code, while remaining compact enough to etch 48 times onto a single die.

Does the whole thing therefore run at 60MHz, I asked? Apparently clock speeds haven’t been decided – always a hazard with prototype hardware. Mr Howard did reveal, though, that they’ve had chips working in the laboratories at speeds from 125MHz all the way up to 1.3GHz.

You’d imagine that running 48 cores at 1.3GHz must eat up a lot of power, but with all cores active the processor idles at around 75W, and even at full tilt draws only around 125W.

“And we can shut down cores in blocks of four when they’re not needed,” added Howard. “That’s done in software too – the whole thing is designed to be managed in software.”

It’s fair to ask what practical use there is for Rock Creek. After all, most desktop applications benefit more from single-core speed than multi-core parallelism. Howard himself didn’t suggest a killer application for it, though the official project title obviously hints at the idea of offloading tasks to a “cloud” of local CPU cores.

But with its native x86 support, one possible role for Rock Creek is to provide an accessible alternative to stream processing, as popularised by Nvidia’s CUDA – and Intel has certainly aimed it at the same markets.

“We’ve already given a hundred of these to researchers and academics,” Howard revealed. “You know, just so they can start considering how they might program for it.”