Thanks, in part, to its acquisition three years ago of TANDBERG Television, Ericsson has created a complete 3-D solution for home TV display that addresses challenges in both the contribution and distribution areas of the process.
“Consumers will be able to get the same enhanced experience in their living room as they do at the movie theater,” said Staffan Pehrson, head of solution area TV at Ericsson. Full spatial resolution is essential, he said, noting that his company’s solution has been optimized to ensure 3-D feeds are compressed and delivered correctly. Ericsson’s technology works for broadcast, cable and direct-to-home satellite.
Getting 3-D to work well in the home has been a tricky and difficult journey, Ericsson noted. While the telecommunications industry has invested billions to solve the last-mile problem, 3-D necessarily involves a great deal of complex engineering to solve the last-meter problem, i.e., getting the right signals into the consumer’s eyes at the right time to trick the brain into perceiving depth. These are non-trivial issues, the company said, both in engineering and human terms, and many human factors need to be taken into account to optimize the entire 3-D viewing experience.
Ericsson’s technology is made up of three key components:
- The CExH42 MPEG-4 AVC HD contribution encoder provides a platform for 3-D contribution links, ensuring full control of encoding parameters, exact synchronization and time-stamping of the compressed frames and the generation of a fully packaged 3-D simulcast.
- The RX8200 receiver offers new technology that ensures the exact temporal and spatial relationship between left and right feeds is also maintained at the receive end.
- The EN8190 HD encoder is for direct-to-home satellite delivery. Ericsson said it is paramount that 30D deployments using frame-compatible methods use the best available compression technology to maximize the consumer 3-D experience. This encoder provides the MPEG-4 AVC HD compression, using new in-house technology designed to enable conversion to an all-HD world.
Ericsson offers a white paper on 3-D TV that explains the issues and its solutions completely. It can be downloaded here.
