‘Surround vision' unveiled
27 April 2010
This new system would enable TV programmes to spill off the screen and into your living room.
Surround sound technology uses multiple speakers to extend the world of a TV show beyond the edges of the screen, so that the audience can hear what’s happening just off-camera. Now, researchers at MIT’s Media Lab have developed a system called Surround Vision that uses ordinary handheld devices to do something analogous, but with images.
“If you’re watching TV and you hear a helicopter in your surround sound,” says Santiago Alfaro, a graduate student in the lab who is leading the project; “Wouldn’t it be cool to just turn around and be able to see that helicopter as it goes into the screen?”
Surround Vision is intended to work with standard, Internet-connected handheld devices. If a viewer wanted to see what was happening to the left edge of the television screen, they could simply point their mobile phone in that direction, and an image would pop up on its screen.
To get the prototype up and running, Alfaro had to attach a magnetometer, a compass, to an existing handheld device and write software that incorporated its data with that from the device’s other sensors. But Alfaro says that devices currently on the market, including the most recent version of the iPhone, have magnetometers built in.
Alfaro and his advisor, Media Lab research scientist Michael Bove, predict that, if the system were commercialised, the video playing on the handheld device would stream over the Internet, so TV service providers wouldn’t have to modify their broadcasts or their set-top boxes. “In the Media Lab, and even my group, there’s a combination of far-off-in-the-future stuff and very, very near-term stuff, and this is an example of the latter,” says Bove. “This could be in your home next year if a network decided to do it.”
When he’d rigged up a handheld with requisite motion sensors, Alfaro simultaneously shot video footage of the street in front of the Media Lab from three angles. A television set replayed the footage from the centre camera. If a viewer points a motion-sensitive handheld device directly at the TV, the same footage appears on the device’s screen. But if the viewer swings the device either left or right, it switches to one of the other perspectives. The viewer can, for instance, watch a bus approach on the small screen before it appears on the large screen.
Since many DVDs of commercial films now come with bonus footage of scenes shot from different angles, Alfaro was also able to devise demos that allowed the user to switch between the final version of a film and alternate takes.
The researchers plan a series of user studies this summer that will employ content developed in conjunction with a number of partners. Since sports broadcasts and other live television shows already feature footage taken from multiple camera angles, they’re a natural fit for the system.
Image courtesy of Melanie Gonick, MIT
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