On July 13th and 14th the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) hosted its first Stereoscopic 3D conference at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City. I had a chance to attend both days and get the latest on 3D, from the SMPTE point of view.

Matt Brennesholtz
Insight Media Analyst

At the conference, I had a chance to talk to Peter Ludé, Chairman of the conference program committee. In his spare time, he is also Sony’s Senior VP of Solution Engineering, B2B of America. He was justifiably pleased with the conference, both in terms of the quality of the presentations and in terms of the attendance. The 200+ visitors, an estimated 20% of which were from overseas, nearly filled the conference hall. The US attendees were from throughout the US, not just the New York Area. For example I ran into an old colleague from Philips who is currently in charge of the design of video processing chips at Intel in Phoenix. Presumably Intel is considering adding 3D processing to its current line of 2D video processing chips.

Ludé, almost apologetically, began his introduction to the conference on the 13th with his explanation of why the world needs another 3D conference, this one hosted by SMPTE. He said SMPTE brings a lot to the 3D table, including:

• SMPTE initiatives and expertise in Standards development
• Objective and forward-looking perspectives on emerging technology
• Pragmatic view of industry requirements during the evolution
• Peer reviewed papers
• Nearly 100 years experience in helping facilitate technological progress

I agree with him. SMPTE is a very pragmatic organization, strongly oriented toward the content creation and distribution industries. Since most people agree that bad 3D content could possibly kill the 3D industry, it is important that the SMPTE members and supporters understand how to make good 3D content.

SMPTE’s involvement in 3D is not new, the film-based 3D fad of the 1950s was based on the synchronization of the two projectors in a typical theater projection room. More recently, SMPTE issued SMPTE 257-1998 Motion-Picture Film (35-mm) — Stereoscopic Prints with Vertically Positioned Subframes — Projectable Image Areas. In addition to standards, SMPTE issues Recommended Practices (RP). While you can make things work in ways not described in a RP, with so many newcomers in 3D, recommendations from experts are not out of line.

The sessions generally followed the chronological order in the 3D process. The Stereoscopic 3D Image Acquisition session was Tuesday Morning and the Issues in Spatial Authoring session in the afternoon. Wednesday started with the session on Stereoscopic 3D Production and Post-production Considerations and finished with the session on Transmission and Display Technologies.

The presented papers were uniformly good to excellent. Almost every paper blended educational material with information on new technology. At SID, a company can discuss a new LC Display technology without explaining how active matrix works but at this SMPTE conference, almost every author felt it necessary to include a discussion on disparity and parallax. Since many, or perhaps most, of the attendees appeared to be experts, but not experts in 3D, this approach made sense. I am looking forward to the day when knowledge of 3D is universal enough that an explanation of something as basic as parallax is not always necessary.

See more coverage on the presentations in the August issue of Large Display Report. Two of the presentations dealt with 3D on mobile platforms and will be covered in the upcoming issue of Mobile Display Report.