For those with 3-D TVs,…it’s being filmed in 3-D

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In what’s become an annual awww-producing tradition, this year’s Puppy Bowl has a few new tricks up its sleeve. From chicken cheerleaders to the Kiss Cam to watching the whole thing in 3-D, Animal Planet’s Puppy Bowl VII just might make you forget about the Packers-Steelers game altogether!

Meet the Puppy-Meister
We recently caught up with the man who is in the middle of all the action: Puppy Bowl referee Andrew Schechter (who also serves as coordinating producer of the event). Schechter has been making tough “unnecessary-ruffness” calls for four years now and wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Some children grow up wanting to be firefighters; others want to be astronauts,” he says. “I grew up wanting to be the referee of adorable puppies pretending to play football in a miniature stadium. Dreams really do come true!”

Shelter Dogs Rule the Gridiron
This year he’ll ref a picture-perfect lineup of a whopping 47 puppies! “They are all from different shelters. The puppies range in age from 7 to 16 weeks old, and there are 29 different breeds represented,” he says. “Of course, the Puppy Bowl referee doesn’t play favorites but, I must say, Puppy Bowl VII features some of the cutest and most rambunctious puppy players yet!”
Though the super sweet puppies are obviously the main draw of the show, Schechter says that Puppy Bowl VII has taken things up a notch. Last year’s bunny cheerleaders have been replaced with — rather appropriately — chicks.

“That’s right, we have chicken cheerleaders rooting on the puppy players!” he says. “Then, for the first time ever, we’re introducing a new camera angle: the Puppy Cam. This unique perspective gives viewers a puppy point of view, so you feel like you’re a part of the adorable action.”

Technological Advancements
For those with 3-D TVs, this year’s Puppy Bowl will really allow you to get into the fluffy action, as it’s being filmed in 3-D. Also, don’t miss the new half-time performance by John Fulton, host of the upcoming Animal Planet series “Must Love Cats.”

Then there’s perhaps the cutest addition of all: the Kiss Cam! Comprised almost entirely of user-generated videos, the Kiss Cam highlights some of the sweetest human-animal moments out there.

Best Year Ever?
Some things have stayed the same. A fan favorite, the Bissell Kitty Halftime Show that features 16 sweet kittens from shelters, hamster blimp pilots and the water-bowl cam (which is our personal favorite close-up of the pups) are also back as part of the seventh annual event.

In a nutshell, Schechter says that it’s pretty much the best Puppy Bowl ever, and with all of the new features, we’d have to agree. Especially with all of the cute little guys that are in the starting lineup.

Will you tune in to watch Puppy Bowl VII on the Animal Planet at 3 p.m. Eastern on Sunday? We will.

There are videos at the original post here: http://www.pawnation.com/2011/02/04/puppy-bowl-preview-3d-kiss-cam-and-more/

Eye-tracking autostereoscopic systems require fast response times of less than 100 ms and must track head and eye movements.

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Ulrich Leiner, researcher from the Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz Institute talked about evaluating motion and binocular parallax as depth cues in autostereo displays.

3-D displays have a number of applicable technologies for showing images. Autostereo displays operate by providing two or more views to a single viewer. The problem is that these views only show a reasonable 3-D image in a few angular dimensions, the sweet spot(s) are limited. To address this problem, his research uses a display-mounted camera to view the user’s eyes and steer the visual fields to the eye locations.

This image feedback system requires fast response times of less than 100 ms and must track head and eye movements. To be useful, the system needs to be robust and not be affected by skin color, eye color, hair cuts and changing levels of illumination. To move the images on the display, there are three possible –mechanisms. They could control the focused backlight, shift and scale the pixels, or move or switch the beam splitter.

They found that it is hard to shift the pixels at the subfield levels and moving a focused backlight didn’t produce a comfortable image. As a result, they are using a mechanical structure to move the vertical lenticular lenses across the x-axis to match the head and eye movements. A feedback loop including the viewer combines the binocular images and horizontal displacement to increase the 3-D effects in the image.

In testing the apparatus, they found that motion parallax is much less effective as a depth cue than the binocular cues. By combining the two, viewers experienced a 20-30 percent increase in perceived depth over either set of cues separately. The resulting images are close to holographic images. The likely applications for this enhanced viewing technology are those that need critical depth information. Some of these applications include medical (especially robotic-assisted surgeries and tele-medicine) and gaming.

See original post here: http://mandetech.com/2011/02/02/motion-and-binocular-depth-cues/