[3D Focus]
The Disney Research Centre, ETH Zurich, Black Rock Studios and Disney Interactive Studios have published a report describing OSCAM – a solution to provide high quality S3D regardless of screen size, reducing production costs.
While the business model for 3D television and gaming is still being established, research in lab centres around the globe are tackling the issues inherent in fooling the brain into ‘seeing’ a 3D image. Many problems can be fixed in a post process but researchers at the Disney Research Centre, ETH Zurich, Black Rock Studios and Disney Interactive Studios have been very active in analysing how various factors such as screen size, viewing distance and individual physiological states can affect stereoscopic perception in real-time interactive applications like S3D gaming.
The team have just released a paper describing their OSCAM solution which attempts to solve the problems with stereoscopic creation processed in real-time. For example, in a first-person perspective game, where the player is in control of the view, a simple collision with another object will result in excessive disparities that cause visual fatigue or destroy stereopsis (see Figure 1). In order to guarantee correct S3D, a controller is required that adjusts the range of disparities to the viewer’s preferences such as camera convergence and interaxial width without the need for expensive computational solutions.
In the report, researchers acknowledge that perceived depth is not just influenced by the disparity between the left and right images (other factors include vertical size and focus pulling) but the ‘geometrical approach’ (distance between the two images) is the most important influence on perceived depth and this is where their research has been focussed.
In it, they establish there is a comfort zone for perceived depth for each individual viewer. This ‘range’ (also called a ‘depth budget’) consists of the sum of the negative and positive disparities. Disney researchers are proposing a “stereoscopic control mechanism for disparity that is able to guarantee an exact mapping of arbitrary (personally chosen) content to a comfortable target depth range.”
Their controller allows any scene content to be mapped into a specific depth range (‘depth budget’ or range between positive – screen elements appearing ‘behind’ the screen, and negative – screen elements appearing ‘out’ of the screen) when the viewing geometry values are known (screen size and viewing distance). …
OSCAM considers …
Applications for OSCAM
Adaptive stereoscopy and automatic fail-safe …
Changing target screen size and viewing conditions …
Post Production …
As producers and platform owners become increasingly keen to push 3D content on a wide variety of devices from IMAX to mobile phones, Disney’s solution could be a compelling proposition, especially to drive down costs. For example, when Atlantic Productions produced Flying Monsters 3D, they had to re-shoot different versions for the 3D cinema presentation and 3D television presentation. Also, such a rendering engine could allow 3D games intended for small handheld devices be ported to large screens.
Read the full story here: http://www.3dfocus.co.uk/3d-news-2/3d-technology/disney-rd-create-real-time-tool-to-improve-3d-perception/6373