New things are popping up at 3GPP and interestingly there is a new geeky thing called stereoscopic 3D video which is actively researched in 3GPP release 11. Sounds interesting!
The 3GPP Codec working group – SA4 – completed their study on Mobile stereoscopic 3D video earlier this year, assessing use cases and probable solutions.
So what is stereoscopic 3D video?
Stereoscopy is the method of combining two plane pictures in order to produce a depth perception by the human brain. Each eye seeing a different angle of a scene, the human visual system – with subjective assessments – is able to interpret the depth information. These technologies are split into two categories; the glasses based systems and the glasses free systems.
Glasses-free 3D video rendering technologies which have significance to this new concept are parallax barrier and Lenticular lens sheet.
For glasses-based 3D video rendering technologies active-shutter glasses or passive glasses can be used.
Given the fact that the rendering technologies offer different levels of quality of experience such as the resolution per view, the viewing angles a service may benefit from adapting the provided 3D video format to the rendering technology in use. In this case appropriate signalling is necessary to either describe the different formats such that the client can select/request the format or the appropriate signalling of the rendering technology is important such that the server can select or annotate the appropriate format.
Now, the working group has completed specification work, selecting the video codecs:
- H.264/AVC frame compatible formats enabling re-use of existing 3D video deployments,
- MVC, the 3D extension of H.264/AVC for the support of full resolution per view formats.
3GPP video services like HTTP and RTP-based streaming (3GP-DASH, PSS), broadcasting/multicasting (MBMS), download and progressive download (3GPP file format) and messaging (MMS) all support these dedicated signaling and video codecs.
Checkout the TR 26.905 Mobile stereoscopic 3D video specification for further studies.