and some more 3D

When reading through the Inavate on the net I came accross a nice article with some predictions on the 5 to 10 year timeframe and obviously there is one on 3D. For those to lazy to click here this is a copy/paste of specific part of the article

For decades, 3D has languished as a niche play. But it could finally move into the mainstream pro AV market – thanks at least partly to consumers.This year, DreamWorks will release all of its films in 3D. Meanwhile, Imax is paying the U.S. theatre chain to upgrade 100 of its screens to 3D. There are plenty of other examples, but the bottom line is that consumers are encountering 3D in more and more places.

“3D is a certainty to go mainstream in the consumer area in the next five to 10 years because of the availability of content and a strong need for differentiation in order to secure consumers' entertainment dollars,” says Peter Bocko, chief technology officer for East Asia at Corning, which makes glass-based products for applications such as fibre optic cables and LCD displays.If consumer response to 3D is solid – and that’s still a big if – then it would increase revenue for makers of 3D displays and other products, a snowball effect that would benefit the pro AV market, too.

“That will help fund the R&D to bring 3D to a much broader scale, for use particularly by enterprises,” says Phil McKinney, Chief Technology Officer for Hewlett-Packard’s Personal Systems Group (PSG).

Businesspeople also are consumers for part of the day, so their 3D experiences outside of work are another factor: The more 3D they see in their homes and in theatres, the more likely they are to expect it or specify it for work.“It will be five to 10 years for 3D to be ubiquitous just in the home,” McKinney says.

The catch: Their experiences over the next few years are critical because if they’re disappointing or downright bad, 3D could remain the province of lucrative yet niche applications such as medical imaging and automotive design. But if they’re good, 3D could start to show up in applications such as telepresence within five to 10 years.

“You can have a stronger sense of presence in telepresence so you can have tighter collaboration,” says McKinney, who envisions 3D images not only of meeting participants, but also of products they’re discussing.“When you’re building 3D products that have to sit on a shelf and appeal to consumers, the look, size, scale and colour are critically important,” McKinney says. “Today’s collaboration technologies really don’t effectively allow you to share that experience or do collaboration around materials or colour or design, just given the flatness of the telepresence experience.

”A richer experience requires more bandwidth, with the amount varying by the type of 3D. So if the 3D content has to traverse a network, then the cost and availability of that bandwidth affects whether the end user – such as an enterprise – can make a business case for 3D.“To get autostereoscopic (no glasses required) 3D at 1080p resolution, the 3D panel needs to be built on the back of a Quad HD panel to get enough pixels to generate all the views,” says Robert Boudreau, technology development manager at Corning Display Technologies. “This requires four times the bandwidth for the Quad, plus 1.2 times the bandwidth for the 3D, for a total of about five times the bandwidth [of 1080p]. With glasses-based 3D, it’s possible to get away with 1.2 times the bandwidth.”