[Philip Lelyveld comment: article about Sisvel 3D encoding approach]

[Excerpt]

…  In 2010, Sisvel Technology launched an alternative 3D transmission format that fulfills these criteria. The 3D Tile Format™ replaces the ipso facto standard of vertical or horizontal resolution halving, with a full-resolution image for both left and right eyes. The two stereoscopic images for left and right are delivered at full 720p resolution, fitting into the 1080p frame without requiring extra bandwidth. The perceived image quality is therefore of the full HD experience the subscriber signed up for, without the image degradation caused by heavy compression.

Like the current method, the 3D Tile Format does not need any special equipment or changes to production and transmission infrastructure. This sets it apart from other possible alternative methods such as 2D plus delta, which do require alterations in the infrastructure, at the set top box and TV, and in the bandwidth allocation since the 2D signal uses the full 10M bandwidth normally allocated for the channel and the depth (delta) information needs another 40% on top.
What makes the 3D Tile Format a particularly elegant solution is its simplicity: the cropping window information – which is used to slice the image – is already part of the specification of the H.264 format. 
Read more: http://electronicsfeed.com/news/538 …

Read the full story here: http://electronicsfeed.com/news/538

[excerpts]

Some decades ago, a salesguy in a high-end audio shop badly misjudged my socioeconomic status and treated me to an ultrahigh-quality recording of an obscure jazz ensemble, played on a $10,000 audio system in an acoustically perfect room. I staggered out goose-bumped and hair-raised, a newly minted audiophile wannabe. …

Turned around, this “object-based compression,” as it’s called, could provide much higher fidelity than that of a typical 16-bit MP3 in an equal-size file. Apple, meanwhile, is reportedly developing a new digital music player that can handle higher-resolution, 24-bit recordings, but who wants pricier, slower downloads that will make your existing music player obsolete? If Thibault’s compression scheme becomes standard, as he hopes it will, we could keep our 16-bit music players, and headphones could easily catch up; a decent pair of $50 earbuds already well exceed the potential of the music that gets poured into them. My kids may go into audio shock when they find out what they’ve been missing. …

So I got in touch with Karlheinz Brandenburg, who, in addition to being director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Ilmenau, Germany, is also the audio technology legend who largely developed the MP3 file.  …

I would invite you, then, to visit Disney World’s Haunted Mansion, which features one of the most advanced 3-D sound systems in the world. The technology, based on the work of Brandenburg’s lab, surrounds a crowd of listeners with a ring of loudspeakers placed at intervals of a few feet. Each speaker puts out a slightly different version 
of the sound, acoustically re-
creating the direction-dependent environment in which it was recorded.  …

Meanwhile, Roginska’s group is already putting its technique to work in a 3-D audio software program called AudioMaps, which relies on the gyroscopic sensors in some mobile devices to determine which way the device is pointing. For example, if you were listening to an audio tour of New York City, you could simply point your iWhatever at the Empire State Building and the narration would sound as if it were actually emanating from the building.  …

Read the full article here: http://discovermagazine.com/2011/jun/24-forget-3d-screens-need-3d-audio-real-life