In 1932 CP Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian newspaper, pronounced: “Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it!’ Arguably television became the greatest and most influential invention of the 20th Century… with bigger and better things to come in the 21st Century.
Each year over 1.3 billion households around the world watch an estimated 2 464 hours of television (source: Nielsen). This equates to a total of 3.9 trillion hours of television viewing each year!
People love TV. This positive emotional attachment is extremely powerful, and it takes many forms. People describe their TV as a companion, child-minder, advisor, educator, and stress-fighter, among other things. Over the decades television has seen many changes and this decade we are in for a mind boggling explosion of technology that enable us see television in a new light, literally.
We all remember the Star Wars movie in which a hologram of Princess Leia implores Obi-Wan Kenobi to re-join the battle against the evil empire. This “sci-fi technology’ has been developed and refined and is currently undergoing testing by a number of role players around the globe.
Using simple off-the-shelf hardware, researchers at MIT have created a holographic system that updates almost as quickly as feature films. The group believes that holographic televisions could soon be possible.
In November 2010, researchers at the University of Arizona created a holographic system capable of sending, receiving and displaying full-colour, 3D images. Although the system was used to send live images of a researcher in California to collaborators in Arizona, the display updated only every two seconds, making it much less fluid than today’s televisions.
Faster new system
In 2012, a new holographic system from researchers at MIT Media Lab has a display that updates 15 times per second. The researchers are confident that their holographic display will soon update even faster, with rates reaching the 24 frames per second of feature films or faster.
According to the researchers, the main difference between 3D and holographic images has to do with perspective. When a 3D movie, such as Avatar, is shown in a theatre, all members of the audience (regardless of position) see exactly the same image, which is filmed from the same perspective. A holographic image, on the other hand, changes as a viewer moves around it – just like the real world.
This difference in perspective relies largely on the light source for a film. Most 3D cameras, for example, capture light reflecting off of objects from two angles – one for each eye. In the real world, however, light reflects from an infinite number of angles. Holographic video cameras therefore capture light from many more angles than 3D cameras.
The team of MIT researchers built their holographic camera using only off-the-shelf hardware, including Xbox’s Kinect camera.
“Really, the focus of our work in digital holography – and I think this makes us pretty much unique among the very small community of people in the world even doing holovideo – is that we’re trying to make a consumer product,’ said Michale Bove, head of the Object-Based Media Group at MIT Media Laboratory.
In the system’s basic setup, a Kinect camera sends image data to an ordinary laptop, which transmits it over the Internet. A receiving PC then computes the diffraction patterns using three commercial graphics processing units (GPUs). The only component of the system that isn’t off-the-shelf is the holographic display.
Bove’s display is built off of the research of Stephen Benton, who built the first holographic display in the 1980s and died in 2003. Unlike older models, the new display—called the Mark-II—is compact, produces larger images and should be less expensive to produce.
Holo-TV
TV holographic technology has long been in development by a Japanese broadcaster NHK. So confident are the engineers NHK has committed to creating the first holo-TV in the next six years. They are sponsoring research at giant Japanese companies such as Sony and Mitsubishi and have sent engineers to America to consult with the MIT scientists on their basic holographic transmissions.
NHK had earmarked £2.8bn for developing holo-TVs, as part of Japan’s now failed bid to host the 2022 World Cup in Tokyo.
Jun Murai, a scientist known as “the father of the Japanese Internet’, is advising NHK. Using holographic broadcasting over satellites, he said, football games in Tokyo could be relayed to a London stadium where full-sized players would appear so life-like that fans would believe they were at the match.
Pie in the sky? Not according to the business boffins at Apple. Recent acquisitions, and a number of patents including a three-dimensional display system that would “mimic a hologram’ without requiring special glasses, all indicate that Apple is ready to move into the TV business and sooner than we think. The patent narrative notes that one current market gap in screen technology is the ability of a device to project stereoscopic 3D images to multiple viewers at the same time.
If anyone can make the world float in the palm of your hand, it seems Apple is intent on doing so, in a big way!
By Ian Dormer
screen africa magazine – january 2013
