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March/April 2020

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TECHNOLOGY www.postmagazine.com 34 POST MAR/APR 2020 ust about this time last year, The Immersive Digital Experiences Alliance (IDEA) was getting ready to launch at the 2019 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The Alliance (http://immersiveal- liance.org) was focused on creating a suite of royalty-free specifications that address all immersive media formats, including emerging light field technology. Its founding members, which include CableLabs, Light Field Lab Inc., Otoy and Visby, came together to create some- thing that would serve as an alliance of like-minded technology, infrastructure and creative innovators working to facil- itate the development of an end-to-end ecosystem for the capture, distribution and display of immersive media. A year later, following a presentation at the SMPTE conference in October 2019, led by Pete Lude, chairman of the board and work group chairman of IDEA, Post caught up with the head of the Alliance to discuss how far IDEA has come since its launch and what the Alliance is hop- ing to accomplish in the year ahead. Can you explain IDEA a bit further? What's the goal, and more about light field and holographic display technology? "Yes, I'll start with the latter, because I think that is really what the motivation for IDEA is in the first place. What's happened is, image technology, as you're well aware, has been marching along. It's not static ever since we figured out how to do things digitally — we've explored wider color gamuts, high dynamic range, higher frame rates, aspect ratios, you name it. We also went through exper- imentation with stereoscopic 3D for cinema. And although it never made it for consumer televisions, it's even now not an insignificant add for box office for theatrical releases. Even 3D is sort of hanging in there because there are some movies that work well in 3D and there are some people who like to see it. And so, we've been looking for that next step. How do you get behind all the prob- lems that exist with current 3D? Having to wear glasses. Having to have limited depth budgets? And having people react poorly to it in terms of nausea and such? "The ultimate answer — the Holy Grail — is called light field technology. And this is where you're able to reproduce all the rays of light, as if they're com- ing — instead of through a TV set or a movie screen — through a window. That means that they're coming from all these different directions. You're not looking at a bunch of dots on a screen that are painting the picture, but you're looking at rays of light shooting out at you in all different directions from every spot. By doing that, you eliminate all the unrealis- tic aspects of stereoscopic 3D. "You don't need glasses, of course, and we're reproducing everything about the real scene as you move your head left or right. You're seeing parallax. You're able to focus your eyes near or far. Because all those light rays are right there as if they were in real life, you are able to see spectacular reflections just as if you move around and the sun shines off the windshield from a certain direction. That's exactly what you see when it's reproduced as light field. This is technology that is real. It sounds kind of like it's science fiction, but it's not. It was identified over 100 years ago before it could be done. "Then about 25 years ago, a bunch of computer scientists figured out how to actually create light fields, both in cam- eras and displays. But it wasn't very prac- tical. More recently, we've seen it come into laboratories and even commercial aspects very early on. So it looks like it is possible to reproduce, to capture these light fields and then to reproduce them in a way that's ultra realistic. "A number of companies have been tracking the technology. In fact, all the companies that you could possibly name — Apple, Google, Adobe, Autodesk, Dolby — all the studios, the broadcasters to some degree have been tracking this. Some people say, 'Oh, it's 10 years away, we don't need to worry about it.' But some companies are saying, 'Hey, this actually could have some applications in the not-too-distant future. Say three, five or seven years. And so, we have a big problem because we don't have interchange standards. We don't have any way to transmit it. We don't have any way to exchange files right now. "All the companies that are exper- imenting in light field cameras and displays are using their own proprietary format, just out of necessity. This has been the background conversation that I've been part of for a little over three years, where people would get together. I did a big workshop at one of the Silicon Valley companies about a year and a half ago, and 100 people from all sorts of compa- nies showed up. That was sort of a whole topic of discussion. Thus IDEA is what came out of it, a little over a year ago. "A number of companies were talking and saying, 'You know, what we really need to do is to have a sort of an advoca- cy group — some formal forum in which we could sit down and talk about these things and create formats. One of the interested members was, Otoy, [which] has technology [that] is quite suitable for transmitting and storing light field images, and has been used experimentally for that. The guys at Otoy were good enough to say, 'Hey, if you want want to do this, you're welcome to it. We will license our technology to you royalty free and you can make that available to everybody. "So the goal here was to get together to create an interchange format and ulti- mately a transmission format to allow the use of light fields — to be able to take any light field authoring device, content, cameras, computer graphics, and send it out to any display. So-called 'display agnostic'. So it's not a format married to one specific technology and let's make it royalty free. It's not going to be encum- bered by a huge patent portfolio. Let's educate people about how to use it and make it transparent and open, and get everybody involved, from technology companies to cinematographers — make sure that we're meeting everybody's needs. We want to get it out there in front of the public and march it along. We know it's a big job and it will take a few years. So, while we know that light field technology isn't quite there yet, we feel now is a time that we need to start THE BIG IDEA BY LINDA ROMANELLO J NAVIGATING THROUGH A PERFECT STORM OF TRENDS IDEA's Pete Lude

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