3D revolutionized Hollywood. Ever since Avatar (produced by SCA alum Jon Landau) took the technology to the next level of refinement and accessibility, companies across the entertainment industry have been looking for the next big thing when it comes to 3D technology. Earlier in October, SCA’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) helped a team from the Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) test a new 3DTV delivery system, for which the ETC provided facilities and participants to assist MPEG’s test.

"Providing MPEG with a testing platform for 3DTV delivery performance is completely consistent with [the ETC’s] mission to help provide our media, entertainment and consumer electronics company sponsors with feedback on consumer response to new technologies,” said Ken Williams, ETC Executive Director and CEO.  “We were pleased to host this process."

The Entertainment Technology Center brings entertainment studios, technology providers and other key industry stakeholders together in order to improve digital entertainment initiatives. The ETC strives to show how technology impacts the next generation consumer, which will improve the consumer experience and will uncover new revenue streams for entertainment-related products.

Current 3DTV broadcasts are in half resolution. MPEG’s test checked 3D broadcasting in full resolution in order to quantify the student’s reactions from the current half resolution broadcast systems to full resolution. Viewers were asked to rate a series of images based on the perceived quality of the images. The ratings, on a 0-10 scale, were aggregated to form a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) that ranked the various technologies and determined the performance of the proposed system(s).

MPEG is well known all over the world its innovation and commitment to furthering technology and as being the place where the more important standards of the telecommunication world were born. Recently, MPEG launched two new compression algorithms.

Vittorio Baroncini, MPEG test chairman, supervised all the testing and data processing
activities. The results of the test were recently presented to the 102th MPEG meeting in Shanghai.

For more information on MPEG, please visit: http://wg11.sc29.org/
On the ETC, please visit: http://www.etcenter.org/