| Abstract | Ultra-realistic communications are future means of communicating that provide users with a highly realistic presence. The technologies to achieve these communications are varied and include ultra-high definition/3-dimensional images, reproduction of highly realistic surround sound, and multisensory communication that includes touch and smell.
Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) is developing Ultra-HDTV system, called Super Hi-vision, which has four times the pixels of HDTV both horizontally and vertically. The images can be viewed as close as 0.75 times the height of the screen. At the proximity, the angle of viewing is 100 degrees, which confers an enhanced sense of reality.
National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) is researching Ultra-realistic communication technologies that provide natural and real information to everybody. Main research subjects are holographic 3D video, super multi-view 3D video without special glasses on and super surround audio systems. We also researching necessary requirements for ultra-realistic systems based on underlying principles of human information processing.
The Ultra-Realistic Communications Forum (URCF) was established on 2007 to ensure efficient industry-academia-government collaboration in research, development, verification experiments, and standardization on ultra-realistic technologies. Especially standardization of FTV (Free-viewpoint TV) is being actively discussed in a working group of URCF.
Ultra-realistic communication systems have quite huge amount of data. For example, the data rate of Super Hi-vision, super multi-view 3D video and electronic holography video is 72Gbps, more than 200Gbps and more than several hundred Tbps respectively. Then efficient video coding algorithms are required for the ultra-realistic communications.
In the Symposium, I will introduce research on ultra-realistic communications, activities of URCF and describe the expectation of new picture coding technology. |