3-D TV is Officially Dead (For Now) and This is Why it Failed

By Stephen Cass

Posted 7 Jan 2014 | 22:09 GMT

As 3-D printing proudly enters the front door at CES 2014, 3-D TV is quietly being ushered out the back. The technology is still offered as a feature in most lines of high-end sets that already have it, but after years of relentless promotion and product releases from TV manufacturers, stereoscopic displays have been dropped from headlining most presentations and exhibitions (with the notable exception of LG, which has repeated its giant 3-D video wall from last year at its booth.)  And at least one major manufacturer appears to be abandoning it entirely, with Vizio dropping support for 3-D in its latest products.

Photo: Stephen Cass

3-D TV’s Last Stand? LG featured a huge wall of 3-D displays at it booth, but other manufacturers relegated 3-D offerings to corners—or didn’t bother showcasing them at all.

Attention among manufactures is shifting to UHD, which, like 4G in telecoms, is actually a catch-all name for a grab bag of related technological improvements. (UHD covers not just higher resolution, but also options for improved color depth, sound, et cetera.) But before 3-D TV is put back into the technological attic, it's worth discussing why it was such a spectacular failure (and hopefully learn some lessons for the future.)

There seem to be four main answers that seem to be bubbling up:

1. A small, but significant, number of consumers either don’t have stereoscopic vision in the first place, or found that the technology gave them eye strain or headaches.
2. The initial rush to get 3-D TV technology out meant that content was often created with immature systems by inexperienced creators, resulting in a great deal of poorly produced 3-D content that alienated early adopters. And good 3-D production requires non-trivial investments in training and equipment.
3. 3-D was largely useless as a story telling tool. With the exception of 2009’s Avatarand 2013’s Gravity, people were hard pressed to think of live-action movies that used the technology as an integral part of the cinematic experience.
4. Sports, which was considered to be a potential killer app for 3-D, fell victim to fact that inviting people around to watch the big game didn’t really work with handing out glasses, not least because of the expense involved in buying additional sets.

Photo: Stephen Cass

Holding Out Hope: A prototype of Sony’s new head tracking accessory for 3-D headsets shows that even if the market for 3-D video entertainment is dead, the dream lives on.

It’s unlikely that the dream of 3-D TV is dead. Indeed there are already people talking about how 8k video is what’s needed to make it really work, so expect inevitable resurrection attempts to come in a few years, perhaps with VR-style headsets, such as the Oculus Rift, or a commercialized version of the 3-D headset prototype Sony was demonstrating at its booth But when it does come around again, it’s worth looking at that list above, and ask what’s really changed.

For more from CES, check out our complete coverage.

Live Blogging from "Fool Me Once; Fool Me Twice. Lessons Learned on 4K"

Organic Thin Film Transistors Approach Speed of Polysilicon Cousins

By Dexter Johnson

Posted 10 Jan 2014 | 18:32 GMT

For years now, Zhenan Bao, a chemical engineering and materials science professor at Stanford University, has been coming up with new techniques to speed up the charge carrier mobility of organic transistors, which have labored under painfully slow speeds compared to their crystalline- or polycrystalline silicon cousins.

A little over two years ago, Bao developed a strain technique much like that used in silicon chips to increase the speed of organic semiconductors. At the time, it was believed that the strain technique could increase the frequencies at which organic circuits operate by as much as four times the rate of existing organic devices.

While even that much of an increase still left the organic circuits operating at one-hundredth the speed of crystalline silicon circuits, the hope was that the advance had opened up a path towards cheap, plastic, high-resolution TVs.

Now Bao and colleagues from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln havedeveloped a new technique that they claim can raise organic semiconductors' operating speeds to levels approaching those of the polysilicon-based devices that control the pixels in advanced TVs.

Advanced research-stage organic transistors have achieved carrier mobility speeds between 5 and 15 centimeters squared per volt second (cm2/Vs), according to Bao, with typical organic transistors staying at about 1-2 cm2/Vs range. The organic transistors in these experiments were not uniform in performance, but their carrier mobilities clustered around 43 cm2/Vs (with one high-end outlier at 108cm2/Vs). Polysilicon transistors typically reach 100 cm2/Vs , with the latest research claiming speeds of 135-500cm2/Vs. So, a carrier mobility speed of 108cm2/Vs is certainly in the territory of polysilicon transistors

The technique, which is described in the journal Nature Communications(“Ultra-high mobility transparent organic thin film transistors grown by an off-centre spin-coating method”)  follows most of the traditional method for creating organic thin film transistors—placing a solution of carbon-rich molecules and a polymer on a spinning disk made of glass. The novelty of the new technique is that they spin the disk at a speed that is faster than usual and coat only a small portion of the disk's surface.

The result is a denser concentration and a more regular alignment of the organic molecules. This, in turn, yields much faster carrier mobility in the resulting thin film transistors.

The Stanford-Nebraska method is still highly experimental at this point. The researchers, who have dubbed their technique "off-center spin coating," have yet to gain a high level of control over the alignment of the organic materials or achieve uniform carrier mobility.

Despite these limitations, the researchers claim that the transparent thin film transistors they've created perform at levels comparable to that of polysilicon materials currently used in advanced displays.

Photo: Jinsong Huang and Yongbo Yuan

Spherical Display Lets You See 3-D Animations from Any Angle

By Jeremy Hsu

Posted 25 Aug 2014 | 17:00 GMT

Image: The University of British Columbia

Researchers from the University of São Paulo, in Brazil, and University of British Columbia, in Canada, have developed a spherical display that lets users see and interact with three-dimensional objects. In one demonstration, viewers have the sensation of staring into a snow globe that they can control with simple gestures from any angle.

The device, called Spheree, represents the first display capable of projecting uniform, high resolution pixels on a spherical surface—a technology that also allows users to interact with the 3-D display objects by using gestures.

The Spheree allowed attendees at the SIGGRAPH 2014 convention held in Vancouver last week to play with a Snow Globe 3D animation that included a house, animated snow and a train chugging around the house. That interactive display required eight pocket-size projectors mounted at the base of the globe, as well as software capable of blending together the individual projector views to create a uniform pixel presentation from almost anywhere on the spherical surface.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82spsYiCB4A

Small pico-projectors like the ones used for the demonstration have lower resolution and brightness than traditional projectors—a problem for a virtual reality system that aims for high quality. But the international team of Brazilian and Canadian researchers used an auto-calibration algorithm called FastFusion to seamlessly combine the resolution and brightness of the many projected images without a resulting decrease in quality. A basic webcam allows the algorithm to see the position of the individual projector images on the globe and compute each image's contribution to the overall final image.

The auto-calibration system works with practically any number of pico-projectors, which means researchers could build ever-larger versions of Spheree. The team has already tested a four pico-projector system with an 18-centimeter-wide display and an eight pico-projector system with a 51-centimeter-wide display. By avoiding the use of special mirrors or lenses, they avoided having "blind spots" in the overall projected image.

Spheree also uses six infrared cameras to track the movement of special headbands worn by viewers. The  data the cameras feed to a computer constantly provide perspective-corrected virtual scenes based on a viewer's position with respect to the globe. Gesture control with a Leap Motion interface also allows users to interact with the 3-D scenes or animations by using gestures to start, move forward and backward, pause and stop animations.

The system uses a second computer to run 3-D animations with Blender Software. Researchers envision Spheree helping animators or modelers by showing 3-D computer animations or the results of image-based rendering applications—perhaps as a second screen. A larger version of Spheree might provide walk-around experiences for team projects or show up in interactive museum displays. Future video games or toys might also make use of such technology.

Spheree contributors: University of British Columbia, Canada; Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC), Brazil; Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), Brazil; and University of Saskatchewan, Canada.

Samsung Bets On OLED Printer Maker Kateeva

Photo: Kateeva

Let’s talk OLEDs. The news this week is that OLED startup Kateeva, based in Menlo Park near Facebook’s campus, just collected another $38 million in funding, a chunk of that from Samsung. 

Why is this interesting? After all, Kateeva’s been around since 2008 when it spun out of MIT; it already had about $70 million; and OLED has been the unrealized next big thing in large display technology for far too long. But there does seem to be something significant in this announcement. Or maybe I’m just desperately looking for a sign that OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) technology is really a competitor for large screens, because I’m tired of silly tweaks to regular LCD technology. (Enough with the curved screen already.)

First, a little background. Making an OLED display requires somehow placing the light-emitting (OLED means organic light-emitting diode) materials on a substrate in precise patterns of red, green, and blue pixels; a fuzzy pattern means a fuzzy picture. Today’s OLED display manufacturers use shadow masks and vapor deposition create the patterns, typically on glass. That wastes the material that hits the mask. It also limits the screen sizes: Large shadow masks are not physically stable enough to reliably produce defect-free pixels, and trying to use a small mask to make a big screen by repeatedly moving it adds yield-killing contaminating particles. That’s why the large-screen OLED TVs on the market today are so crazily expensive—the yields are lousy and the wasted ink is expensive.

 A lot of people have thought for years that ink-jet printing would be a much better approach, but they’ve had problems getting it to work reliably, thanks to too many particle-caused defects and uneven printing (like what you might see on your inkjet printer at home when the cartridge starts to run dry). They’ve also had problems with the operating lifetimes of displays made this way compared with those made using the more typical vapor deposition process. Still, there’s been a race on to make a truly practical ink-jet printer for OLEDs. Merck and Epson have been working on it; as has Dupont. As has Kateeva. The winner could own manufacturing for the next generation of TVs.

Photo: Kateeva

Kateeva says it’s got it figured out and will be ready to ship manufacturing equipment, at least for the smaller displays that go in mobile devices, by the end of the year; with large-screen manufacturing systems to follow. The company says that part of making it work is its decision to surround the printers with nitrogen, which improves display lifetimes. It also indicated that it made a number of tweaks designed to reduce particle defects, including shielding parts that tend to generate particles, using filtering systems, and developing its own process monitoring and printing algorithms to eliminate printing unevenness.

OK, so here’s what else is interesting. This announcement isn’t coming from a TV manufacturer unveiling an amazing “price and ship date to be determined later” technology at CES; this is a manufacturing equipment company. That makes (relatively) cheap, large-screen OLED sound very real.

And Kateeva, even with Samsung’s investment, isn’t tied to any one TV manufacturer—it will sell its equipment to anybody, so if the process works, once it gets going we might start really seeing cheap OLED TVs, because the competition will be on.

The announcement also is a reminder of Samsung’s growing presence in venture capital and the world of startups. Back in 2013, Samsung created the $1 billion Ventures America Fund and a $100 million Catalyst Fund and set up what it calls a Strategy and Innovation Center on Sand Hill Road, the prime Silicon Valley address for venture investors. When the Ventures America Fund was first introduced, the company said the money would be going into components and subsystems, not content and services. But Samsung isn’t ignoring software, last year it also set up a software startup incubator, the Samsung Accelerator, in the former Varsity Theater on Palo Alto’s University Ave., and plans to turn part of the building into a “working cafe” that’s open to the public. (It's a smart way to troll for startups at the early early pre-garage stage.)

Finally, this latest evidence of Kateeva’s success is one more sign that Silicon Valley’s energies may be focusing back on hardware. Author Mike Malone recently predicted that Silicon Valley is about to face a technical shift from software back to hardware; he can put this one down on his “evidence” list.

Click for curtain-up: technology and theatre

Can cutting-edge technology work in a play? Maddy Costa (who can't work an iPod) dons a projector necklace and goes looking for portals

Tech-heads ... Analogue theatre company in Living Film Set. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

In a world dominated by digital media, theatre can seem old-fashioned. You might buy tickets for a show online and tweet about it afterwards, but mostly the shows themselves are sheltered from the technology that saturates modern lives. Does that mean theatre-makers are missing a trick? The Pervasive Media Studio thinks so. Based in Bristol since 2007, it exists to foster relationships between the computing, communication and creative industries – and this year it's paying particular attention to theatre.

"The theatre sector lags behind in its uptake of cutting-edge technology. It's ripe for some innovation." So says Katie Day, a director herself, temporarily based at the studio as the producer for its Theatre Sandboxscheme. Six theatre companies have been commissioned to explore working with "pervasive media" – basically defined as mobile- or sensor-activated technology, from text messaging to the RFID chips used in Oyster cards on London's public transport – supported by the studio's technology experts and £10,000 funding each.

For someone like me, who is unable to navigate an iPod, the idea is fairly intimidating. Yet the three productions I participated in were absorbing, tender – and required no technological skills whatsoever. At the Junction in Cambridge, young company Analogue presented Living Film Set, an autobiographical show that re-creates the moment when co-director Liam Jarvis's father left the family home, 25 years ago. Using doll's house furniture positioned on a complex tabletop computer screen that, when touched, triggers video and soundtrack material, the piece subtly succeeds in putting its audience in Jarvis's childhood shoes.

In Bristol, meanwhile, Proto-type Theater enacted a test run of Fortnight, in which participants are guided around the city by text messages and emails, in search of "portals": installations concealing RFID readers that, when triggered by a chip, will play a piece of music.

In London, sound artist Duncan Speakman and theatre companyUninvited Guests' collaboration, Give Me Back My Broken Night, leads its audience through a future Soho. The maps we follow are not real, but computerised images projected from box projectors we wear like necklaces on to a sheet of A3 paper that we hold in front of us. These projectors are connected to a central computer, and there is a dazzling moment when I'm invited by my guide to redesign Soho Square – and my dream vision, drawn by a computer artist, instantly appears on my map.

All six pieces are still in development; they will be presented at a showcase in Bristol on Friday, and the hope is that they will be given full productions in the future. But even if that doesn't happen, says Day, Theatre Sandbox has achieved something vital. "It's created a group of people confident with technology, who can spread that knowledge. Mostly this technology is used in advertising, to push stuff at you: it's important to give artists these tools, so they can challenge that."

Day is aware, however, that a culture clash exists between theatre and technology."Technology seems generic," says Peter Petralia, artistic director of Proto-type, whereas theatre is interested in the personal. Jarvis says Analogue set out to mix "pervasive media with a kindergarten, arts-and-crafts aesthetic", hence the models of Jarvis's house and furniture. Technology, he emphasises, provides a set of tools – not the show itself. "You put the emotional journey first, and see what technology can lend to that."

But while technology allows audiences to immerse themselves in these productions, aren't they atomised as a result, with the collective experience sacrificed to heightened individual experience? Duncan Speakman disagrees. He has spent five years making work in public spaces, with audiences wearing isolating headphones, and argues: "When people become aware of the fact that others are doing the same thing as them, they connect. It's about trying to reconnect people who have become disconnected from their surroundings" – chiefly because of pervasive media.

Much as he has enjoyed investigating complex technologies, Speakman is wary of the "novelty whizz-bang factor" that characterises their current relationship with theatre. He compares it to surround sound in cinema: "You don't watch a film because it's in surround sound, yet that is a key technology in film today." Like all the theatre-makers involved in the Sandbox scheme, he says technology wasn't uppermost in his mind when collaborating on his piece. "Magic: that was what we were thinking about. You have a map in front of you and drawings appear on it – that's magic." He thinks it unlikely anyone will shout about the technology. "You don't say to people: come and see this pervasive media work. You say: come and see this piece of theatre – it's magic."

Choices in Cyc Lighting Have Really Changed

The Greeks had the Sun. Dickens had candles. Moulin Rouge had foot lights. The Rat Pack had tungsten fixtures. We now have LED Technology!

Technology keeps giving us more options.  Recently, I have been seeing show after show change from traditional cyc lights or strip lights to LED technology.  There is the obvious difference of having more color options, but there is another artistic difference as well.  Previously, we were used to adjusting the color and contrast ratios with cyc units from the bottom and the top.  This gave us the ability to have either the lower section or the higher section of the cyc be brighter or more saturated in color, with whatever you wanted to do in-between.  This has now been elevated withLED Units.  The reason for the elevation is that the LED units use many more channels and you can often cue each individual cell.  This means that you are not limited to just having your “blue” all across the bottom. Now you can have a rainbow of color going across.  The choices are only limited by your imagination.

This video from Chauvet shows what I am talking about as far as being able to control individual cells.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zswzn8FsSE8

In general, these sort of units are fixtures you would mount close to the cyc itself.

If you are looking for a more traditional cyc, here is a video from Altman Lighting that shows the comparison and changeover from a traditional Sky Cyc setup to almost a seamless LED situation.  This is a very effective and straightforward way to reproduce the way you may have been doing your cyc but giving you a much more expansivecolor palette.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP8RjqBw8co

This video is specifically about the Altman Spectra Cyc 200 that shows an incredible amount of light output.  This is also a great unit to swap out older style Sky Cycs with.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiE08tOZiXE#action=share

This next video is of the Altman LED Spectra Strip.  Where this differs from the units above is that you can have this unit sit closer to the cyc for its blending.  You can get it in color changing options or in complete white and then use traditional gel.  If you need height but space is limited, this is a great option.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up--BPUdGDQ#action=share

If you want to see some amazing usage of cyc manipulation with LED fixtures and you are in NYC, go checkoutIf/Then.  Ken Posner, the lighting designer, has one of the most sophisticated eyes on Broadway.  The way he turned the cyc into a continuation of the scenery was wonderful and deserves the price of the ticket just to see his work.  Of course the show itself blew me away!

Here is a fun video from the Heathers website that gives a great example of how you can move LED light across the stage.  Sadly Heathers is closing or when you have read this have already closed   Fun Show!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fIO8jHXw1k#action=share

Published in Design Thoughts & How To's, Latest Blog, Stage Lighting Blog - The Final Glaze on July 16, 2014 byLouie Lumen

Blending New and Old Technology From a Design Point of View

Theatrical lighting equipment has changed so much over the last century. As in our personal situations, stage technology is changing at an exponential level. Some people will say it is great and others are not happy about it at all. Suffice it to say that change is here and it will always be here. Either embrace it or become obsolete

I think having the ability and artistic sense to be able to blend technologies is incredibly important. Years ago I was designing a series of A Christmas Carols at Theatre Three in Port Jefferson NY. A Christmas Carol is a story that lends itself to magical moments and visual interest. Much can be done with good old fresnels and lekos. Choosing the right color, shape and direction can help set the environment that moves the story along. Can they be helped with adding some new technology? Hecky Doo – YES! Back then, having color scrollers was “new” technology. Imagine it though. Now instead of that light only having one color, I could choose between ten or fifteen colors. Then what about this new swanky thing called a gobo rotator?Now I can have Marley being sucked into his world of hell with a spiraling gobo instead of just a red or green light uplighting him.

New spot technology

Old spot technology

Check out this very informative video to see more on today’s new spot technology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O5ecp1oCXs#action=share

My point to this story is that in the productions I was doing, I went ahead and invested in some actual moving light spots. With these units I was able to have the Ghost of Christmas Present glow every time she gave a blessing. The Ghost of Christmas Past was able to walk around at all times surrounded by an aurora borealis effect. Then when the Ghost of Christmas Future came out, I was able to have so many lightning bolts happening in so many varied places that could never could have happened before. Those sort of effects greatly helped the show. Those sort of effects are also fairly obvious.

In today’s world of Broadway, LED Wash Units and Moving LED Spots are common place in the rig. It is the designer that uses them with the idea of correct style that really impresses me. Recently I saw Ken Posner’s lighting for Cinderella. Now what I am about to say is not because I know Ken. I actually haven’t seen him since undergraduate days. His work is elegant. He blended the sensibility of Rogers and Hammerstein’s music with today’s, and yesterday’s technology. If you are a lighting student or just someone who loves lighting, please go see it. Sure, everyone thinks the costume changes are the star of the show, and yes they are amazing, but Ken’s work is just wonderful. Each and every scene is visual excellence.

With today’s technology you can add variant color and movement like these pictures to enhance your look. It can go well beyond just simple colorchanging.

An example of old wash light technology

An example of new wash light technology

My point to this blog is that you can use the color options of the LED’s and the moving options of moving lights without them just being a Rock Concert. If you’re careful in your choices, you can make them match any style you need to do. Just because a LED fixture can put out a really saturated dark blue with huge vibrancy doesn’t mean you have to use it. I guess the real trick always comes down to understanding style.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zswzn8FsSE8#action=share

Published in Design Thoughts & How To's, Stage Lighting Blog - The Final Glaze on May 6, 2014 by Louie Lumen