What does smart TV mean?
Like a smartphone, a smart TV offers a number of "Internet-connected services" that normal televisions can't offer. It has the equivalent of a computer built into it, giving you a greater number of services. These televisions offer apps, media streaming, Web browsing, games and, perhaps most importantly, Internet Protocol Television (IPTV). IPTV is a specific Internet video standard, but is also used nowadays as shorthand for any video streamed via the Internet to your TV. It can take the form of short clips or continuous "live" channels.
What is Smart TV?
Smart TV is an experience, it's what entertainment lovers have always wanted but never had before: Its integrated, so everything important to the consumer is connected and searchable on a single screen, from billions of hours of video to personal content Its interactive, complementing broadcast programming with the ability to instantly find and watch television shows and movies, download Internet applications, and easily surf between channels and Web sites for a completely new way of using television, instead of just watching it The smart TV experience will let people: Search online and personal content as well as broadcast programming all from the same TV interface Access downloadable applications Connect to social networks while watching favorite programs or movies Control TV with a unique new remote control or voice commands Access an infinite amount of entertainment possibilities
Why do I need one?
While smart TVs have plenty of whizz-bang features, there is one that promises to revolutionize how we use our televisions. Just as Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) brought with them the idea of "time shifting"--where you were no longer restricted to watching a program when it was aired--IPTV is the next "killer app" of smart TVs. Not only that, but smart TVs use a system called DLNA that lets you stream media from computers or phones to your TV. If you currently download a lot of video or music from the Web, then the right smart TV can access that content directly without you having to copy it onto a disk or USB stick!
How do I connect my TV to the Internet?
All of the smart TVs currently accept an Ethernet cable at the back of the TV, while most also support wireless connection. To connect to the Internet, you will need to set up a home network, and the process is very similar to connecting a laptop.
What if I don't want a new television?
If you have bought a flat-panel TV recently, then there is another way to get the smart TV features without having to buy a new television. Several companies offer settop boxes with smart features onboard. Investing in a media player is also an economical way to bring streaming content to your home theater system.
How do I control the TV?
To many people, a "smartphone" is a handset with a touchscreen, but when your TV is 2m away this makes it hard to "touch". As a way to get around this, manufacturers have come up with several different methods for controlling smart TV.
Video Quality. It should be noted that the term "smart TV" has no bearing on the actual quality of a television's picture. There are HDTVs and 3D TVs which can be called smart TVsthey simply need Internet connectivity, and ideally a good CPU that's capable of running a full-featured browser and the many apps that are available on modern smart TV systems. They connect to a home's Internet via WiFi, usually allowing for very quick browsing and even video viewing. As processors get smaller and more powerful, smart TVs have gained dozens of features and have gradually become more affordable.
Apps And Browsers. Modern smart TVs from companies like Panasonic* and Sony* have two major advantages over DVRs and set-top boxes. Many newer sets actually have full browsers, which means that content isn't restricted. As video streaming websites like Netflix* and Hulu* become more and more popular, full Internet capability on a television can be more valuable than cable or a satellite dish. There's a wealth of legal video content available online and smart TVs are quickly becoming a great way to access that content. Most newer smart TVs also come with app stores, similar in design to the app store that Apple* introduced for the iPhone*. Apps add functionality to a smart TV with video games, sports updates, specialized channels and much more. These apps are cheap or free and have already been used in exciting ways to make television viewing more interactive
How will smart TV evolve? Its going to be fantastic! First of all, people will always like what they watch because it will be recommended based on viewing habits or from friends, or from whats hot according to their social networks, for example. So we start with personalised content. Then we move on to informative TV, whereby our smart TVs provide direct access to information and services related to what we are watching. For example, well be able to inquire about a soundtrack and download it to our smartphone. Or we might want information about an actor and the other films theyve starred in, maybe flicking over to watch one of them. Or we could find out about the restaurant that features in a films opening scene and immediately book a table. We will be able to point-and-click on a piece of clothing being worn by an actress and buy it on the spot. Or we may wish to investigate where a particular scene was shot and book a flight to get there, for example. The impact on advertisers will be seismic as well. And then theres the social element. In the future smart TV will bring a variety of social experiences with varying levels of desired interaction. Each family, community and circle of friends have their own preferred way of sharing and being together, and new smart TV technologies and services will drive a host of opportunities for bringing them together. Connected gaming, popular social networking sites or instant messenger-type services are expected to form part of the experience once adapted to better suit the smart TV experience. Imagine two friends being able to watch a quiz show together and discuss answers via a video conferencing window in the corner of the TV screen despite living miles apart. Imagine a daughter sharing personal video clips with her family, or even sending a programme about her Mums favourite celebrity chef directly to her Mums TV. Then theres the realm of virtual self-expression and richer social engagement. Imagine being part of a virtual band with virtual instruments and broadcasting a virtual concert from a virtual location! The possibilities really are endless when you have innovative
companies taking advantage of the full internet and powerful processors to make consumers lives so much better.
3D TV
II. BASICS OF 3D TV Human gains three-dimensional information from variety of cues. Two of the most important ones are binocular parallax & motion parallax. A. Binocular Parallax It means for any point you fixate the images on the two eyes must be slightly different. But the two different image so allow us to perceive a stable visual world. Binocular parallax defers to the ability of the eyes to see a solid object and a continuous surface behind that object even though the eyes see two different views. B. Motion Parallax It means information at the retina caused by relative movement of objects as the observer moves to the side (or his head moves sideways). Motion parallax varies depending on the distance of the observer from objects. The observer's movement also causes occlusion (covering of one object by another), and as movement changes so too does occlusion. This can give a powerful cue to the distance of objects from the observer. C. Depth perception It is the visual ability to perceive the world in three dimensions. It is a trait common to many higher animals. Depth perception allows the beholder to accurately gauge the distance to an object. The small distance between our eyes gives us stereoscopic depth perception[7]. The brain combines the two slightly different images into one 3D image. It works most effectively for distances up to 18 feet. For objects at a greater distance, our brain uses relative size and motion As shown in the figure, each eye captures its own view and the two separate images are sent on to the brain for processing. When the two images arrive simultaneously in the back of the brain, they are united into one picture. The mind combines the two images by matching up the similarities and adding in the small differences. The small differences between the two images add up to a big difference in the final picture ! The combined image is more than the sum of its parts. It is a three-dimensional stereo picture. .
Fig.3.1 Depth Perception
D. Stereographic Images It means two pictures taken with a spatial or time separation that are then arranged to be viewed simultaneously [5]. When so viewed they provide the sense of a three-dimensional scene using the innate capability of the human visual system to detect three [Link] you can see, a stereoscopic image is composed of a right perspective frame and a left perspective frame - one for each [Link] your right eye views the right frame and the left frame is viewed by your left eye, your brain will perceive a true 3D view.
Figure 2 shows the stereographic images. E. Stereoscope It is an optical device for creating stereoscopic (or three dimensional) effects from flat (two-dimensional) images; [Link] first constructed the stereoscope in 1844. It is provided with lenses, under which two equal images are placed, so that one is viewed with the right eye and the other with the lef [5]t. Observed at the same time, the two images merge into a single virtual image, which, as a consequence of our binocular vision, appears to be three-dimensional. F. Holographic Images A luminous, 3D, transparent, colored and nonmaterial image appearing out of a 2D medium, called a hologram. A holographic image cannot be viewed without the proper lighting. [Link] OF 3D TV
Figure 5 shows the schematic representation of 3D TV system. The whole system consists mainly three blocks: 1 Aquisition
2. 3.
Transmission Display Unit
A. Acquisition The acquisition stage consists of an array of hardware-synchronized cameras. Small clusters of cameras are connected to the producer PCs. The producers capture live, uncompressed video streams & encode them using standard MPEG coding. The compressed video then broadcast on separate channels over a transmission network, which could be digital cable, satellite TV or the Internet. Generally they are using 16 Basler A101fc color cameras with 1300X1030, 8 bits per pixel CCD sensors. 1) CCD Image Sensors: Charge coupled devices are electronic devices that are capable of transforming a light pattern (image) into an electric charge pattern (an electronic image). Figure 6 shows CCD sensors.
Fig.5.2 CCD Image Sensor 2) MPEG-2 Encoding: MPEG-2 is an extension of the MPEG-1 international standard for digital compression of audio and video signals. MPEG-2 is directed at broadcast formats at higher data rates; it provides extra algorithmic 'tools' for efficiently coding interlaced video, supports a wide range of bit rates and provides for multichannel surround sound coding. MPEG- 2 aims to be a generic video coding system supporting a diverse range of applications. They have built a PCI card with custom programmable logic device (CPLD) that generates the synchronization signal for all the cameras. So, what is PCI card? 3) PCI Card: .
Fig.5.3 PCI Card There's one element the bus. Essentially, a bus is a channel or path between the components in a computer. We will concentrate on the bus known as the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI). We'll talk about what PCI is, how it operates and how it is used, and we'll look into the future of bus technology. All 16 cameras are individually connected to the card, which is plugged into the one of the producer PCs. Although it is possible to use software synchronization, they consider precise hardware synchronization essential for dynamic scenes. Note that the price of the acquisition cameras can be high, since they will be mostly used in TV studios. They arranged the 16 cameras in regularly spaced linear array.
Fig.5.4 Arrays of 16 Cameras B. Transmission Transmitting 16 uncompressed video streams with 1300X1030 resolution & 24 bits per pixel at 30 frames per seconds requires 14.4 Gblsec bandwidth, which is well beyond current broadcast capabilities. For compression & transmission o1 dynamic muitiview video data there are two basic design choices. Either the data from multiple cameras is compressed using spatial or spatio-temporal encoding, or each video stream is compressed individually using temporal encoding. The first option offers higher compression, since there is a lot of coherence between the views. However, it requires that a centralized processor compress multiple video streams. This compression-hub architecture is not scalable, since the addition of more views will eventually overwhelm the internal bandwidth of the encoder. So, they decided to use temporal encoding of individual video stream on distributed processors. This strategy has other advantages. Existing broadband protocols & compression standards do not need to be changed for immediate real world 3D TV experiments. This system can plug into today's digital TV broadcast infrastructure & co-exist in perfect harmony with 2D TV. There did not have access to digital broadcast equipment, they implemented the modified architecture as shown in figure 9. Eight producer PCs are connected by gigabit Ethernet to eight consumers PCs. Video stream at full camera resolution (1300*103D) are encoded with MPEG-2 & immediately decoded on the producer PCs. This essentially corresponds to a broadband network with infinite bandwidth & almost zeros delay. The gigabit Ethernet provides all-to-all connectivity between decoders & consumers, which is important for distributed rendering & display implementation. So, what is gigabit Ethernet? '
Fig.5.5 Modified System 1) Gigabit Ethernet: It a transmission technology, enables Super Net to deliver enhanced network performance. Gigabit Ethernet is a high speed form of Ethernet (the most widely installed LAN technology), that can provide data transfer rates of about 1 gigabit per second (Gbps). Gigabit Ethernet provides the capacity for server interconnection, campus backbone architecture and the next generation of super user workstations with a seamless upgrade path from existing Ethernet implementations. 2)Decoder & Consumer Processing: The receiver side is responsible for generating the appropriate images to be displayed. The system needs to be able to provide all possible views to the end users at every instance. The decoder receives a compressed video stream, decode it, and store the current uncompressed source frame in a buffer as shown in figure 10. Each consumer has virtual video buffer (VVD) with data from all current source frames. (I.e., all acquired views at a particular time instance).
Fig.5.6 Block Diagram of Decoder and Consumer processing The consumer then generates a complete output image by processing image pixels from multiple frames in the VVB. Due to the bandwidth 8 processing limitations it would be impossible for each consumer to receive the complete source of frames from all the decoders. This would also limit the scalability of the system. Here is one-to-one mapping between cameras & projectors.
What do you see as being the advantages of smart TV for the consumer? There are many advantages indeed, such as: The ability to access over a billion hours of content on the TV with the click of a button New user interfaces that will make it easy to find what you want in no time at all Recommendation engines that will even dynamically generate channels for you depending on your viewing habits Apps that will enhance TV with information found on the web Social and content networking applications which allow viewers to interact with their friends based on the content theyre watching