I was at two events this week – the ITEC event in Stuttgart and the NEC Showcase in London. I had hoped to get the ITEC report done for this week, but it didn’t make the cut, so it will be in next week’s issue (although online earlier). ITEC was interesting as it is, traditionally, a large display show because its about simulators and training and is basically a military and defence event. However, this year, I wrote a note as soon as I got into the show ‘VR everywhere’.
Obviously, doing simulation on a small screen is much (much) cheaper and simpler than on a big screen or CAVE, so it has instant appeal to those that control the budgets. It also makes it easier, as somebody said to me at a previous ITEC, to ‘bring the training to the soldier, not the other way around’. However, the experience is obviously both more artificial, but may be more involving, than a cave.
One of the unusual points for me about the event is that almost nobody was talking about HDR. HDR has been a topic that we have been covering for a very long time. We reported on the concept in September 2005 (Volume 12 #38) and I enthused about the experience of seeing it in a hotel suite during CES 2006, when Brightside showed it. (Volume 13 #3). Dolby then bought Brightside and spoke about it at our DisplayForum event in 2008 (Volume 15 #44). It went away as a topic for a while, but came back with a vengeance. Nearly thirteen years on, we still haven’t got a settled set of standards with lots of matching content. Anyway, back to ITEC.
HDR is not a big deal at ITEC in flight simulators because the reality is that pilots rarely see the ground with saturated colours or high contrast. Atmospheric haze has a big impact on the view of the landscape that pilots typically get, so simulator makers are not under any pressure to boost contrast to very high levels or create extreme colour gamuts. Although I have heard in the past that HDR was desired to allow some of the dramatic change in lighting effects that you can get above and below cloud cover, although I got no support for that point of view in Stuttgart.
Black level, on the other hand, is important, as simulators in the professional segment need to be able to work in nighttime lighting conditions, which have to be realistic as they will also be used with night vision systems.
VR, especially if it uses OLEDs, should be able to get a very good black level because of the control of ambient light, although, at the current state of the art, personally I find that the screen door effect stops me being able to treat the images as anything other than synthetic. However, next week is SID and I’m sure I’m going to see something that would make a fantastic headset!
We’ll have a big team at SID and look forward to meeting many of our subscribers there.
Bob
