Monday Art Berman and I visited 3 companies in New York City as part of our data gathering for the Insight Media/USDC 3D report and Workshop. (http://insightmedia.info/conferences.php) The main purpose of the trip was to gather information on the markets for 3D. The main question was not what was going to happen in the distant future, if 2010 still counts as the distant future, but who is making money in 3D today, and what markets are open today to 3D entrepreneurs.

Matt Brennesholtz
Insight Media Analyst

At the first company, Newsight (http://www.newsight.com/), we talked to John Bingle, the CEO, and Keith Fredericks, the CTO. Newsight makes autostereoscopic 3D displays in their Jena, Germany facility based on barrier rib technology. Several of these were on view in the conference room, ranging from a relatively high resolution 8" display intended for point of purchase applications with a single viewer, to a 40" display intended for digital signage and other applications with larger audiences. These displays looked OK, but the brightness was low. Although the classic barrier rib design for an eight view autostereoscopic display reduces brightness by a factor of about 8X, Fredericks said the Newsight design was optimized and only reduced the brightness by a factor of 4X. This is still a big hit for the digital signage market where it is normally necessary to see the display in relatively high ambient light conditions. While Newsight has been primarily a 3D company in the past, it is entering the more general digital signage market. Their current big installation in progress is a complete digital signage network at Meijer, a Mid-western hyper-market chain. They have completed installations in 50 stores, with a total of 175 stores in the plan. Each store gets about 20-30 displays as part of the network. Newsight said that about 4-5 channels of video will go into a store, each targeted at a different portion of the store. In the current phase of the installation, all the displays and video are 2D: installation of 3D displays is expected in a second phase starting in 2007. According to Bingle, the acceptance of 3D in digital signage markets has been very high in the Middle East, India and Asia, moderate in Europe and lowest in the US. Insight Media believes that success in the Meijer 3D network and other 3D networks in progress might change this.

The second visit was with Jason Goodman and Rich Pincus at 21st Century 3D (http://www.21stcentury3d.com/). Goodman, the CEO and Founder of thecompany, has been a 3D enthusiast for a long time. He says he made his first (unsuccessful) 3D image when he was about 8, using red and blue crayons. He has been making increasingly sophisticated 3D images ever since. He was not satisfied with existing 3D cameras so he built one he designates the 3DVX3. This is built from two Panasonic DVX100B cameras, with electronic, mechanical and software "glue" all developed by 21st Century 3D to make them work together. The camera will record 1 hour of 24 fps 1280 x 1024 3D video on a pair of 100G hard drives. In high vibration environments such as helicopters, flash memory systems capable of recording 24 minutes of video can be substituted for the hard drives. The video is 4:4:4 uncompressed with 10 bit gray-scale resolution. The camera, including the hard drives and batteries, can be carried on the cameraman’s shoulder like a conventional 2D professional camera. The image is visible to the cameraman in the 3D viewfinder. Goodman showed us some of the video produced on this camera and the image quality was fully up to HD standards, plus it had 3D. 21st Century 3D has produced 3D videos for a variety of clients — mostly corporate clients where the video was used for corporate promotion at special events and trade shows.

The final visit of the day was with Tom Zerega and James Zahakos of Magnetic Media (http://www.magneticnetworks.com/). "Magnetic" has nothing to do with hard drives: It refers to the strong attraction that consumers have to 3D displays. This attraction, according to Zerega, makes them the ideal media for advertising on digital signage networks. Magnetic Media has inherited the Nightvision network it co-developed with Newsight using Newsight barrier rib displays. They had in their office a newer autostereoscopic display based on lenticular elements. The advantage of the lenticular design over the barrier rib design is lenticulars do not have the 4X to 8X brightness hit that barrier ribs have. This makes them much more suitable for high ambient light conditions that can be expected in most digital signage venues. In the Nightvision network, where the 3D displays were installed in a couple of dozen nightclubs, this brightness advantage is not so important.

Insight Media is convinced from these visits and other information that digital signage and corporate promotion will be two important moneymakers for the 3D industry. While Newsight, 21st Century 3D and Magnetic Media are all currently relatively small companies, the growth of these markets is likely to allow them to grow as well. –MB

Learn more about 3D markets at the 3D workshop on November 16th or in the Insight Media 3D Report to be released in January 2007.