Chris Chinnock Senior Analyst and Editor for Insight Media

The 3D@Home Consortium held its inaugural quarterly general members meeting in East Palo Alto, California yesterday. The gathering provided an opportunity for member company representatives to get an update on activities, to hear about other 3D activities and standards interests, and to begin the process of forming the four steering teams that will comprise the main activities of the consortium.

The 3D@Home Consortium (www.3dathome.org), formed with the support of 30+ member companies, will speed adoption of 3D in the home by understanding the requirements of 3D content creators, 3D content distribution and 3D displays, and help provide pre-standardization information while helping to clear roadblocks.

The quarterly meeting was preceded by a meeting of board level and leadership level companies, where the formative Participation Agreement was discussed. This agreement will set the conditions for consortium membership, and rights and benefits of member companies and organizations. Issues related to voting, non-disclosure of information, and protection of intellectual property were discussed and agreed upon. The result will be a solid document that has been vetted by top-flight companies who have participated in other industry consortia.

To kick off the general quarterly meeting, Insight Media provided a 90-minute briefing to the board and leadership level members. In this briefing, the methodology, assumptions and key results of Insight Media’s new 3DTV report were discussed. This included a review of the technology assessments and commercialization prospects for 3D display technologies, 3D file format analysis and the forecasts, including pricing models and penetration analysis.
Mark Hartney of USDC provided an update to the members on the consortium’s status. He reviewed membership recruitment, the Participation Agreement, and planned activities. Leading member company representatives, including Martin Oerder from Philips, Jae Seung Kim from Samsung, and Thierry Borrel from Thomson shared their perspectives on priorities for the consortium activity.

Brian Markwalter from CEA then described their standards activity and how 3D has generated substantial interest, resulting in the formation of a 3D Discovery Group. This group will be gathering information about 3D video and the 3D@Home Consortium will be aiding in this process.

Next up, Thierry Borrel from Thomson and Martin Oerder from Philips described two European 3D R&D projects, OSIRIS and 3D4YOU. Both are government funded programs with multi-company support with ambitious plans to push the envelop of 3D content capture and display.

Finally, members began to organize the missions, objectives and specific tasks of each of the four steering team groups. These four steering teams are focused on:
ST1: 3D Content Creation and Production
ST2: 3D Content Storage, Transmission & Distribution
ST3: 3D Education and Promotion
ST4: 3D Displays and Human Factors

In an open and creative process, members discussed each of these steering teams — formulating ideas, processes and specific steps that may be helpful in making sure each team has a well thought out mission, plan and outputs. Steering team leaders will now refine these ideas and recruit participants to begin the work.

While specific details of the consortium’s activities are only available to members, general information will now begin to be posted in the coming weeks at www.3dathome.org.
3D remains a hot topic of interest, with Mitsubishi announcing a new initiative to help bring more 3D content to the home via a deal with nVidia and Aspen Media Products. There is much work to be done, but getting many of the key players all rowing in the same direction has got to help.

The next quarterly meeting for the 3D@Home Consortium will be held on October 2nd at Universal Studios.