3D cinema everywhere

Today the film industry is boiling in anticipation of a revolution in the cinema. Studio Dreamworks Animations makes its films only in 3D, Disney is rapidly going in the same direction, and all promising blockbusters this year will be screened in digital format. And to appreciate the beauty of new films, the viewer will inevitably go to the cinema.



But in the coming years, the situation may change. This is due to the HP technology code-named Pluribus . With it, you can watch movies in 3D on a wide screen in any room where you can fit with your friends. How is this possible?



On the way of the ubiquitous distribution of 3D cinema, the high cost of cinema equipment now stands.



So, Roman Nikitin, head of the “CINEMA” department of the ISPA Group of Companies , fixes the cost of the video path for a digital cinema with 200 seats and screen sizes up to 12 meters within $ 150-180 thousand. This includes a media server with specialized software, a digital projector, a polarization filter , a special screen with high reflectivity and a set of points for viewers.

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According to the data available to ISPA, by mid-2009, 161 screens were equipped for digital cinema in Russia (almost all of them were for the 3D format). Before the release of "Avatar" there was a growth in the growth of installations of digital equipment, but the novel is not yet evaluated.



Supply is clearly less than demand. Therefore, to get to the film in 3D today, the majority of the population of Russia will have to go to another city, stand in a queue at the box office and pay more money for the ticket.

Alternative?

HP Pluribus technology, the prototype of which in 2007, PC Magazine magazine, called "one of 5 ideas that will change the modern computer industry," was recently shown to the public at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, USA.



The idea of ​​Pluribus is simple: instead of one powerful projector with additional equipment, we can use an array of several ordinary consumer projectors for $ 1,000 each. In the current prototype, 12 projectors are monitored by a conventional PC so that the images from them are folded and overlapped to form one large, bright picture. In the 3D version, six of them work for one eye, and six for the other.



Interestingly, the projectors do not need to be carefully calibrated to synchronize - this will make the computer. Actually, it can be 12 different projectors, issuing pictures of different resolutions and brightness! It’s as if you have gathered your friends and organized a “projector party”.







The controlling PC must “look” at the screen with a digital camera in order to adjust the overall picture. So that in the dark room you could use a regular consumer camera for this, complicated scientific work was done and a special image recognition algorithm was created.



The creators of Pluribus are Nelson Chang and Niranjan Damera-Venkata from HP Labs, our research and development division. They have already managed to show technology at the prestigious SIGGRAPH and IEEE International Conference on Image Processing conferences.

3D cinema in every city? Not.

Although HP Pluribus technology allows you to create a movie-like image on the screen, there is a serious obstacle on its way to commercial cinemas. Alexander Rubin, the head of Kinoproekt , says that systems that show commercial digital cinema must follow the strict specifications of SMPTE and DCI , which are designed to protect content from illegal copying. According to them, the video sequence is transmitted to the projector in encrypted form and is decoded only immediately before being output to the DLP matrix.



Such a mechanism of protection of films just released from screens from getting into the Internet in the framework of the current Pluribus project cannot be implemented.

3D for business and entertainment? Yes!

Thus, to give impetus to the development of digital cinemas using Pluribus, HP still has a lot of work to do. But now a perspective is opening up for a whole new layer of collective entertainment (private amateur cinemas, computer games) and business applications (advertising all over the wall of the shopping center, visualization of complex three-dimensional models, etc.).