If you missed “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” at the theater, you’ll still be able to get your 3-D fix at Cable-Tec Expo. CableLabs, the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers and a handful of consumer electronics manufacturers will have a demonstration of the latest 3-D theater, television displays and cable system delivery at the conference.
The CableLabs 3-D TV Pavilion, co-sponsored with the SCTE, will include the first transmissions of synchronized, full color, high-definition, stereoscopic 3-D video signals over a single cable channel on a real cable system, the co-sponsors said. The technology being used will not require viewers to wear special glasses to see the 3-D effect.
The Comcast Media Center (CMC) will be providing 3-D content from cable television programming networks to the CableLabs 3-D TV Pavilion. The CMC aims to help small- and medium-size operators that otherwise may not be able to participate in costly advanced-video services such as 3-D.
The 3-D TV Pavilion will have a mini theater provided by Sony and a home theater set up by Panasonic, as well as displays of consumer 3-D television sets from Hyundai IT, LG Electronics and Sony. The 3,400-foot booth will be part of the Cable-Tec Expo show floor in the Colorado Convention Center in Denver.
“Our goal in producing this demonstration is to make the cable industry further aware of the power of 3-D theater experience in the home, as well as at the movies,” said Paul Liao, president and CEO of CableLabs. “We truly value the willingness of these consumer electronics companies to support this endeavor for our industry, and we thank SCTE for making us a part of their valuable engineering event.”
“We think 3-D television delivered to the home may be a way for cable operators to differentiate themselves with consumers, and we are very interested in the technology on display in this pavilion as a component of that effort,” said Comcast CTO Tony Werner.
“3-D plays an integral part of Sony’s ‘Lens to Living Room’ story, and our joint demonstration with CableLabs will further showcase the importance of 3-D for the cable connected home,” said Randall Waynick, senior vice president of strategic alliances for Sony Electronics.
The Sony Theater will feature a 21,000 lumen 4K SXRD projector in an approximately 900-square-foot enclosed cinema. Sony’s 4K digital cinema projection systems offer what it says are among the highest picture resolution of all available projection technologies – 8.8 million pixels, or slightly more than four times greater than high-definition. The system employed also uses a RealD XLS 3-D passive stereo optical system that includes the RealD recyclable passive cinema eyewear.
Sony will also show its prototype 3-D-ready LCD flat-screen TVs using 240 Hz HFR technology with active shutter glasses to deliver a Full HD 3-D home experience. As part of the connected home future, Sony’s is also bringing to the cable customer new ways in which multimedia content can be viewed and shared, by enabling Sony HDTVs to be directly connected over a home network and to the customer’s broadband high-speed Internet service.
Panasonic will demonstrate its Full HD 3-D Home Theater experience in a living room setting with a 103-inch plasma TV. The entire setting has been built into a 53-foot 3-D tractor trailer, part of a fleet of trucks that the company is traveling to industry and other destinations to promote the power of 3-D. Panasonic plans to demonstrate 3-D delivery over cable systems by participating in this historic first cable delivery of stereoscopic 3-D content to the 3-D plasma screen in the truck.
Hyundai IT will show the latest Model (S465D), a 46-inch LCD, Full HD polarized 3-D display playing real-time 3-D digital content. Hyundai S465D is capable of displaying both 2-D and 3-D content and has integrated real-time 2-D to 3-D video processing capability.
LG Electronics will demonstrate a 47-inch LCD HDTV model that allows viewers to use passive polarized glasses to view the stereoscopic images displayed by the TV. LG’s new 3-D HDTV, available on the consumer market in South Korea since August, uses a high-contrast and high-brightness LCD panel that displays high-quality 1080p Full HD 2-D images, and also 3-D stereo images that can be delivered over HDMI interface ports in one of many possible formats. The UI presents an intuitive and user-friendly way to select the inputs and format.
