Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Technicolor concept brings the stadium to your sofa - Pocket-lint

Personalized Content Renderer - this is another name for Free View Point video, where you as the viewer can pan and zoom a virtual camera at a live event.



http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/43991/technicolor-concept-personalised-content-renderer


Technicolor has demoed a new technology at this year's CES in Las Vegas that would allow you to watch a football match as if you had actually had a seat in the stadium.
The new tech, dubbed Personalized Content Rendering, which is expected to become a commercial reality in the next couple of years, uses six cameras at the stadium to create the ultimate moving panoramic view.
Where Technicolor comes into the project is through the behind-the-scenes software that merges the six individual video feeds into one before allowing you control over where to look within that picture.
The demo, shown on the company's stand at the trade show, was supposed to be using a Microsoft Kinect sensor for the Xbox 360 tracking your eyes and head movement. However, following some technical issues and too many passers-by confusing the system, Technicolor was forced to use a trackball instead for the purpose of our demo.
That said, the demo easily showed what was possible with the ability to not only look around the entire stadium as if we were there, but also to zoom in on the action, although at the moment that makes the image blurry and out of focus.
To solve this problem Technicolor is also working on letting the software intelligently know when to switch camera views to ones tracking specific players or detailed action.
The result is that the system has plenty of potential for sports broadcasts: allowing you to watch the game how you want to watch it, rather than relying on what an editor thinks is important.
Would you watch a football game like this? Let us know in the comments below.

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