MOBILE3DTV project finalized

Mission accomplished! The MOBILE3DTV project ended and has provided core technology for new mobile 3DTV systems. Summarizing our work in pictures, here are the posters that we presented at the presentation of the final end-to-end MOBILE3DTV system at ICT2010 in Brussels.




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MOBILE3DTV @ ICT EVENT 2010

The MOBILE3DTV was selected as exhibitor at the ICT event 2010 in Brussels. The project’s booth was located in the “Content & Knowledge Zone”. The concept of the booth that was developed within the project consortium was a presentation of a first end-to-end system of 3D content delivery optimization over DVB-H. For each stage, an expert sent by the task-leading partner within the consortium was present at the booth. The core of the booth was the demo of the first MOBILE3DTV end-to-end system including a DVB-H transmission of 3D content to a first prototype developed within the project. Within the demo, the visitors at the booth could follow the whole chain of the system from the provider including available contents of different genres and content creation, optimized stereo video encoding methods and error resilient transmission, to the receiver side including visual optimization, 3DTV handheld devices. Finally, all visitors were able to become real users in the user experience stage in which they were able to experience mobile 3DTV on the first available prototypes.




Beyond the overall demo of the system, specific information and small demos for each stage of the production chain were presented on additional mobile 3D video devices. The specific demos demonstrated different coding approaches like MVC or the Video+Depth approach or simulated different transmission artifacts or error resillience strategies so that visitors at the booth were able to see the challenges for which the MOBILE3DTV project provided technological and methodological solutions.


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Mobile3DTV at the Mobile World Congress, Barcelona, 15-18 February 2010.

The Mobile3DTV project partner MMS will be present at the MWC as part of the Texas Instruments' ecosystem of partners and developers. MMS will be demonstrating stereo camera and 3M auto-stereoscopic display integrated in to TI's popular Zoom OMAP36x-III mobile development platform to enable 3D video capture, encoding and display of stereo content. Visit TI's booth in Hall 8 - 8A84.
More information about can be found here.
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Mobile3DTV project invited to give two workshop talks

Researchers from the Project Mobile3DTV are invited to give some talks at 3D-related workshops:

• Dominik Strohmeier from Ilmenau University of Technology will give a talk at the 6th Salzburger Medientag 2009 on 18. September 2009. His talk "Mobile3DTV - Meet the Users" will cover the aspects of user needs and requirements of Mobile3DTV and their relevance for the user-centered development process of Mobile3DTV. All presentations at the Medientag will be given in German.
  

• Update: Satu Jumisko-Pyykkö from Tampere University of Technology will give a talk at 3D Media Workshop in Berlin organized by Heinrich-Hertz-Institut, Berlin, in joint collaboration with national and international research projects. The talk "User-centered quality of experience of Mobile3DTV" will target the new approaches of our research to form a holistic framework for QoE assessment. The workshop takes place from 15.-16. October 2009.
  

Feel free to meet us at one of the workshops.
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Mobile3DTV featured on on ICT Results - "A third dimension for mobile phones"

We are happy to announce that Mobile3DTV was featured on ICT Results. We would like to thank the ICT Results team for helping us to promote our project on the web. Here is an excerpt from the article; link to the full text is at the end.

Simulating the third dimension is something of a Holy Grail for cinema and television. The key advantage of 3-D film over the conventional two dimensions is the illusion of depth and the sense of ‘body’ the viewer experiences – as if the action is leaping out of the screen rather than occurring within it.
“The mobile market has always been much more dynamic and receptive to new technologies than the television market, as the whole idea of mobility is based on dynamism,” explains Atanas Gotchev, the scientific coordinator of the EU-funded Mobile3DTV project.
The story of 3-D television for mobile phones has been one punctuated by stops and starts. As early as 2003, Sharp launched a 3-D mobile phone in Japan and Korea’s SK Telecom launched a 3-D phone – from Samsung – in 2007, and Japan’s Hitachi just launched one in 2009. But the big challenges have been the paucity of content and coming up with a profitable business model. Apple’s iPhone also supports three-dimensional television, but can currently only be viewed with special glasses.
Mobile3DTV is developing the core elements of the next generation of three-dimensional television for mobile devices. “One major challenge is choosing the optimal format for representing 3-D video for mobile delivery,” Gotchev points out. The format should be adopted ideally by all industrial players to avoid a ‘formats war’, he suggests. For that reason, the project decided to build its system around the EU standard known as Digital Video Broadcasting – Handheld (DVB-H).
“Another challenge is to ensure a comfortable and enjoyable 3-D viewing experience," adds Gotchev. Mobile3DTV is employing so-called auto-stereoscopic displays, which produce 3-D images that do not require those awkward glasses to view them – which is good news for people who want to be incognito about their mobile viewing.
“Auto-stereoscopic displays use additional optical elements aligned on the surface of an LCD, to ensure that the observer sees different images with each eye,” explains Gotchev. “As mobile devices are normally watched by a single observer, two independent views are sufficient for satisfactory 3-D perception.”
“We have access to probably the most advanced 3-D portable display – one delivered by the Japanese giant NEC LCD,” says Gotchev.
Mobile3DTV is funded under the ICT strand of the EU’s Framework Programme for research.

Full text is available here:
http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults/index.cfm?section=news&tpl=article&BrowsingType=Features&ID=90580

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New section in our website makes it to span accross borders

We have added a new section to mobile3dtv.eu called "User studies". It discusses the subjective tests on stereo-video quality performed part of Workpackage 4. In order to evaluate the user experience while watching stereoscopic video, new assessment methods have been developed jointly in IMT in Germany and IHTE in Finland.
In a similar way, our website is now shared between different countries. While most of it is hosted in Tampere University of Technology in Finland, the new section resides in TU-Ilmenau in Germany. Since all sections share common navigation bar and have the same outlook, our visitors can seamlessly navigate through our website while roaming between different European servers.
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Mobile 3DTV on Youtube

We have prepared a couple of short movies about our project. The movies are available on our youtube channel, and also at http://mobile3dtv.eu/publicity, our publicity webpage. Currently there are two movies available, with more to come soon. We hope you like them!
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NEC provides 3.1'' 3D TFT LCD Module for Mobile3DTV terminal prototype

NEC LCD Technologies announced that it will provide samples of its 3.1-inch-diagonal 3D polysilicon thin-film-transistor (TFT) liquid crystal display (LCD) module for the MOBILE3DTV terminal prototype. The MOBILE3DTV prototype will be on public display at the Mobile World Congress 2009 (MWC2009), the world’s largest mobile technologies-related event, in Barcelona February 16– 19.

MOBILE3DTV is one of the projects funded by the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007–2013) in the context of its Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) Cooperation theme. The three-year project began in January 2008 and aims to demonstrate the feasibility of mobile 3D TV broadcasting.

The MOBILE3DTV terminal prototype is being developed by a project consortium partner, MM Solutions AD, and shall be displayed at the Texas Instruments booth (Hall 8, Booth 8A 84), which provides the prototype’s CPU.

A sample of the 3.1-inch diagonal LCD module with wide quarter video graphics array (WQVGA) resolution and excellent 3D picture image for bare-eyes viewing will also be displayed in cooperation with NEC Electronics in the NEC booth (Hall 8, Booth 8A 125).

The MOBILE3DTV terminal prototype is being featured at MWC2009 to demonstrate real-time decoding and displaying of 3D video content. The 3D LCD module has been adopted because of its wide viewing areas and high-performance display which features high-resolution 3D images based on NEC LCD Technologies’ unique horizontal double-density pixel (HDDP) system.

Looking forward, NEC LCD Technologies will continue to promote research and development in pursuit of practical uses and mass production of 3D LCDs.
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www.mobile3dtv.eu updated

The website www.mobile3dtv.eu has been updated recently. On the website you can find interesting news about the project research, conference papers, technical reports, and software about mobile 3D television and video.
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Mobile3dtv artefact rendering framework is available for download

We have developed a framework for simulation of mobile 3DTV artifacts. It is able to introduce an arbitrary combination of stereoscopic artifacts to a given video stream, with controlled amount of impairment for each artifact. 

It is organized as a collection of Matlab functions, each one responsible for introducing a specific artifact. The configuration is stored in a text file, which describes the input and output video streams, the set of artifacts to be introduced, and the parameters for each artifact. One configuration file can specify a set of artifact parameters, which to be applied over several input video files in “batch mode”.

The framework operates on stereo-video streams (where left and right channel are provided as separate video files) or dense depth video streams (where video and depth channel are provided as two separate video files). Video is decoded into a set of frames, each frame is processed and the result is encoded in a video stream again.

The current version (1.3a) is available for download on our website, in the software download section

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Mobile 3D makes a comeback this year

A long, long time ago (2003) in a country far, far away (Japan) NTT DoCoMo introduced the first mobile phone with 3D display. The phone, made by Sharp and known by the cryptic name SH251iS had 2.2 inch, parallax barrier-based 3D display, with the usual for 2003 resolution of 176 x 220px. In portrait 3D mode that makes 88 x 220px for each eye - which even back then was barely acceptable.

Fast forward to present time. In 2009, KDDI Japan offers the "WOOO Ketai H001", which is a mobile phone with 3D display from Hitachi. The specs are up to the standards of 2009 - 5Mpix camera, 1seg TV tuner, and most notably - 3.1" 3D display with resolution 800x480 pixels. The display seems to be switchable, parallax barrier 3D (there is dedicated 3D button under the keypad). In stereo-mode this would result in 400x480 pixels for each eye - much more suitable for 3D video, we would say.

Additional note about the resolution: on the KDDI website (as far as we can tell) the phone is listed as being "…3D 3.1 (inch) VGA…", without specifying the exact resolution. The guys from Akihabara news, which probably know better Japanese than us, suggest it is 845x480. However, parallax barrier usually goes with even number of horizontal pixels. Knowing some 3D displays intended for mobile use, we would expect that 800x480 is the proper resolution. We will post an update as soon as we know the details.

[via Engadget and Akihabara news]

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MOBILE 3DTV at 2008 NEM Summit

The 2008 NEM Summit "Towards Future Media Internet", a major conference and exhibition devoted to the field of networked and electronic media and ICT at large, will be organised on October 13-15, 2008 in Saint-Malo (France) by NEM European Technology Platform, under the aegis of the European Commission's DG Information Society and Media.

Two publications of MOBILE 3DTV are on the conference agenda on October 13 ("Delivery of 3D Video over DVB-H: Building the Channel" by Mikko Oksanen, Antti Tikanmäki and Atanas Gotchev from Tampere University of Technology, "Stereo Video Broadcasting Simulation for DVBH" by Oguz Bici, Anil Aksay, Gozde Bozdagi Akar from Middle East Technical University, Antti Tikanmäki and Atanas Gotchev from Tampere University of Technology).

MOBILE 3DTV will also present research results at the 2008 NEM Summit exhibition area.
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MOBILE 3DTV at ICT 2008

The MOBILE 3DTV researchers will present results of the first project months at the ICT 2008, Europe's biggest research event for information and communication technologies, that takes place on 25-27 November 2008 in Lyon. MOBILE 3DTV can be found in the ICT 2008 exhibition on the stand of the 3D Media Cluster.
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MOBILE 3DTV blog is online!

MOBILE 3DTV has created the MOBILE 3DTV blog, a platform for project partners to present their views on topics around the Mobile 3DTV technology and for anyone to comment on this.
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The website of our project is operational.

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