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 at eChallenges e-2009

METU representing Mobile3DTV Project has participated in eChallenges Conference e-2009, 21 - 23 October 2009, Istanbul, Turkey; the 19th of annually held international conference series, supported by European Commission and technically co-sponsered by IEEE. Detailed information about the conference can be found here.

WP3 Leader Gozde Akar from METU gave a presentation in the Workshop titled “Turkey in European Research Programmes – Success Stories” . During the 3 days of the conference, we had a demonstration stand of our DVB-H end-to-end broadcast system in the eChallenge Exhibition area. The stand included the transmission, reception, processing and display of stereo coded video over DVB-H. Also a 17” autostereoscopic display and IPhone with 3D Sheet are used to let the visitors experience 3D in different applications.

During the conference we’ve received feedback from participants of various backgrounds including commercial, government and research organizations. Participants had a chance to experience stereo video personally with the help of an IPhone and autostereoscopic sheet.

At the end of the conference our project has been awarded with “Runner-Up Demonstration Stand Award” which is presented by Mehmet Gokgoz, Director of Turkish Research and Business Organizations (TURBO).
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Update: Mobile3DTV @ NEM Summit

Mobile3DTV participated successfully in this year's NEM Summit in Saint Malo, France. After we had presented our first DVB-H stereo video streaming system last year, we informed about our user studies this year.

We demonstrated our current work on optimizing the mobile 3DTV system through different user studies along the production chain. The visitors at our booth were able to experience real test scenarios. They watched the original test items of our coding study or were able to get information about different transmission artifacts.

Additionally,we informed about our view on user-centered quality evaluation and introduced our Open Profiling of Quality method.


A short coverage of us can be found in ICT Results' report. Thanks to all who visited our booth. Thanks for your interest and your fruitful feedback and discussions. CU next year at NEM Summit in Nantes.
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Quality of Experience (QoE) - Current standardization activities

The assessment of the Quality of Experience (QoE) has become more important in audiovisual quality assessment and MOBILE3DTV has started to evaluate user experience for mobile 3D television and video. Within standardization bodies the topic of Quality of Experience has been included into standardization activities. The goal of ETSI HF STF 354 (Specialist Task Force 354 within the Human Factors Group of ETSI) is to provide requirement guidelines for real-time multimedia services aiming at providing a good QoE. Goal is to provide objective and subjective measures of user experience for given communication situations, service prescriptions and levels of QoS [1]. The guidelines as the expression of measure are available in ETSI EG 202 534 [2] and ETSI TR 102 535 [3].

Within the International Telecommunication Union ITU standardization activities towards QoE are targeted in ITU-T SG12, the lead study group on quality of service and quality of experience within the ITU. Goal of ITU-T SG12 to be able to a) measure quality parameters in next generation networks and b) measure their impact on QoE. The challenge of providing good QoE for new multimedia systems is study item of question Q13/12 “QoE, QoS and performance requirements and assessment methods for multimedia including IPTV”. Main study items are the relation of end-user requirements to system parameters and to identify simple and efficient analysis techniques to measure and monitor QoE. All results will be included into the development of new recommendations.

References:

1. Brooks, P., Hestnes, B., Heiestad, S., Aaby, C. (2006). “Communicating Quality of Experience data for the development of multimedia services”. Proceedings of the 20th International Symposium on Human Factors in Telecommunication, Sophia Antipolis, France, March 21-23 2006, (available from http://www.hft.org/HFT06/HFT_06_programme.htm).
2. ETSI EG 202 534: "Human Factors (HF): Guidelines for real-time person-to-person communication services". ETSI Guide, 2007
   
3. ETSI TR 102 535: "Human Factors (HF): Guidelines for real-time person-to-person communication services; future requirements". ETSI Technical Report, 2007
   

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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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Nokia releases the source code of its MVC implementation

Nokia announced source code of their MVC codec based on their previous H.264/AVC baseline codec. Since it is baseline profile, only IPPP encoding structure can be used.

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Nokia announced today open availability of its MVC source code implementing H.264/MPEG-4 MVC, a leading multi-view video coding standard created jointly by the Telecommunication Standardization Sector of ITU and the Moving Picture Experts Group, MPEG of ISO/IEC. The source code is fully optimized for different uses in mobile devices and includes a player for the Maemo environment, making it easy for developers to take full advantage of the source code in an open, expandable ecosystem.

MVC is the newest addition to highly successful and widely deployed H.264/AVC family of video codecs serving multi-view and 3D video usage. It provides superior network robustness and compression performance for delivering 3D video by e.g. taking advantage of the inter-view dependencies of the different visual channels. In addition, its backwards compatibility with H.264/AVC codecs makes it widely interoperable in environments having both 2D and 3D capable devices.

Nokia acknowledges finalization of the MVC specification and is proud to contribute to the MVC community with this software release. "We are all very excited about this technology and the way it adds a whole new dimension to visual communication and entertainment. We hope this donation helps the developer community to take advantage of the full potential of the MVC technology and stimulates the creation of innovative applications and services", says Jyri Huopaniemi, Director of Nokia Research Center Tampere laboratory.

The software is available for download at: http://research.nokia.com/research/mobile3D. The implementation has also been showcased at Nokia World 2008 using a modified Nokia N800 device with an integrated auto-stereoscopic display for natural real-time 3D video playback.
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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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