The latest issue of IEEE Spectrum has a short article about ‘Ricky Langer’, a techie at ESPN who went from Sports Fan to 3D Guru with ESPN’s recent rollout of ESPN 3D.
The initial plan for ESPN 3D, first announced a year ago, called for baby steps, says Pagano. Games would be presented in 3-D, but commercials and promotional elements would not. “But at the last minute, we were asked to pull a rabbit out of the hat,” Pagano says. That rabbit was the master control system, which integrates the sports programming with commercial and promotional segments—all in 3-D. No such system existed, so it was up to Langer and another engineer on the project to figure out how to pull it off.
Unlike with audio-video synchronization, where a little lag in the audio is hardly noticeable, viewers can pick up on even a single frame’s difference between the left and right eye in a 3-D signal. And even when the eyes are timed correctly, the signals can end up inverted, switching the foreground and the background. In that case, the viewer perceives what ought to be the foreground as appearing behind the intended background, which is out of focus.
via Dream Jobs 2011: At Work at ESPN’s Hidden Sports-Tech Paradise – IEEE Spectrum.
