The Next Dimension in Home Viewing
By Susan Krashinsky, The Globe and Mail
The 3-D trend is moving to televisions, DVD players and video games. A Montreal company aims to get in on the action If the big names in home entertainment have their way, TV viewers everywhere are going to need glasses. It's already happened in the theatres: Audiences have donned Elvis Costello-esque specs and forked out $3 extra per ticket to see 3-D releases such as Up, Monsters vs. Aliens and Ice Age.
Soon, the industry plans to bring the trend home with new televisions, DVD players and video games. But there's a technological challenge to bringing three-dimensional images into the living room, one that a Montreal company hopes it can make a small fortune from - if it can get electronics manufacturers to buy into its solution.
3-D works by showing the viewer two superimposed images. The glasses assign one image to the right eye and one to the left, creating the illusion of real depth. It's easily done in theatres, thanks to a special box attached to the projector that processes the movie. But traditional TV infrastructure is made for only one image at a time.
If 3-D television is going to succeed, manufacturers will have to figure out how to broadcast a 3-D image over airwaves built for two dimensions, or through DVD wires built for just one feed. That's where Nicholas Routhier comes in. The company he runs, Sensio Technologies Inc., SIO-X has spent 10 years preparing for this moment, developing compression technology that squeezes two feeds into one and splits them again at the other end, to make home entertainment work in all dimensions. The company has already scored a deal to encode 3-D for the Avatar video game. Ubisoft Entertainment SA is launching the game alongside the release of James Cameron's 3-D epic in December - the most expensive movie ever made. Sensio is eyeing DVD releases next.
"These guys want to do the releases for next year, 2010. And we're going to be out there," Mr. Routhier said. The possibility for 3-D technology in consumers' living rooms isn't far off. Last year, the chief executive officer of DreamWorks SKG, Jeffrey Katzenberg, announced the studio's animation releases would all be in 3-D. As those popular films go through the box office, the swath of DVD releases that follow could dramatically increase the profit from bringing the 3-D experience home.
TV makers are poised to do just that. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last January, Panasonic unveiled its 3-D TV. This month, it launched a tour - a caravan of three tractor trailers will act as a travelling display room for the TV in the United States until March. Sony said it will also make some products 3-D compatible, such as the popular PlayStation game console and the Bravia TV. "Upgrades really are the lifeblood of the consumer electronics sector," said Kaan Yigit, a new media analyst with Solutions Research Group, a Toronto-based consultancy. "The whole industry depends on some kind of regeneration every four or five years. ... You have to have new technology or else you're at a standstill."
He compares 3-D to technological shifts such as cassettes to CDs, or VHS tapes to DVDs. The switch from analog to high-definition TV over the past five years was worth $10-billion of revenue in Canada, Mr. Yigit estimates. High-definition sets can now be found in 40 per cent of Canadian households, and he expects it to hit 50 per cent by the end of the Christmas season. If 3-D can trigger that kind of consumer shift, it could be worth billions more.
It's easy to see why Sony and others are keen to seize the opportunity, and why upstarts such as Sensio want to get in on the ground floor. Sensio wants to position its technology as the industry standard, so that once the big names launch 3D TVs, they'll have to pay for Sensio's technology to make them work. In February, Sensio was granted a patent on its compression technology in the United States. Last month, the patent was extended to cover all spatial compression techniques. Sensio's stock - which had been at about 50 cents since its initial public offering in 2005 - tripled in value.
The patent gave Sensio the legitimacy it needed. The Consumer Electronics Association and the Blu-ray Disc Association have both said they want to establish a standard for 3-D. Mr. Routhier says Sensio is fighting to be part of that. The Avatar deal is a big step. Once the option exists, the game will be playable in 3-D.
"Sensio is a good technology," said Luc Duchaine, a senior brand manager at Ubisoft. "They were ready to support us and the technology worked well, so that was great." But because there is no standard, Ubisoft is using many types of encoding to make sure Avatar will work in 3-D. "We're trying everything," Mr. Duchaine said, who is skeptical a single standard will be set any time soon. "You saw how long it took to solve the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray standard. ... It's a big problem for us to make sure we support everything."
Mr. Routhier believes he'll be able to convince the industry to bank on a Canadian technology as its 3-D standard. To demonstrate Sensio's capabilities, he has already staged broadcasts of sports events in 3-D at movie theatres, to show it could work for live TV. This month, ESPN showed the Ohio State versus USC football game in theatres with Sensio. But with an open field and plenty of money to be made, he'll have to fight hard to stay in the game. "This is what people want," he said. "These things will happen very fast, we believe."
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