This Thing Called 3D
It has been a heck of a month for 3D announcements. Comcast carried The Final Destination in 3D on the day of its DVD release. The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) seemed all about 3D. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) issued a report on 3D TV. The program recently posted for next month’s Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA) Tech Retreat includes not only a 3D-in-the-Home “supersession” but also other presentations on such issues as 3D gaming, 3D projection, 3D vision, and, from Adobe, 3D video stabilization. Electronic Engineering Times (EET) ran a story on January 21 about an agreement between France’s CEA-Leti and U.S. firm R3Logic “to develop 3D design methodologies for consumer and wireless applications.” And Computerworld on January 27 talked about 3D video graphics chips moving from games to medical imaging.
What does it all mean? That’s the sort of question one might ask after reading the front page of a newspaper, one carrying perhaps a dozen stories on different topics, because the 3D discussed in the above paragraph also covers multiple topics, not all of them associated with depth perception. More »
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The list could go on and on. Hundreds of top technical executives will be there. CTOs and VPs of Hollywood studios and television networks will be there. So will the head of emerging technologies of the European Broadcasting Union. So will the VP of standards of the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) and the director of engineering and standards of the Society of Motion-Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE). Where will they be?
HPA, for example, is not yet 16 years old, but the retreat is older. When the organization that created it, the Association for Imaging Technology and Sound, went belly up, HPA’s founders thought the retreat was too important to die, so they took it over. After 9/11, when other events went down in attendance, the retreat went up. It has actually had to turn people away on occasion because it has sold out.
New Zealand 
to Norway, and from Bombay to Buenos Aires. If someone at the retreat is from NATO, that could be the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the National Association of Theater Owners (both have sent representatives, sometimes at the same retreat); similarly, there have been representatives from MPEG the Moving Picture Experts Group and MPEG the Motion Picture Editors Guild. 
