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August 19, 2005
Virtual reality TV on the cheap
Check this out (CNN)
TOKYO, Japan (Reuters) -- Imagine watching a football match on a TV that not only shows the players in three dimensions but also lets you experience the smells of the stadium and maybe even pat a goalscorer on the back.
Japan plans to make this futuristic television a commercial reality by 2020 as part of a broad national project that will bring together researchers from the government, technology companies and academia.
Sounds like fun. It would be great if it works, but I have some doubts. Can you imagine the bandwidth and processor speed that would be required to convert live action to three dimensional virtual reality? Will Moore's Law get us there by 2020? Look at the improvement that HDTV is over analog TV. It took about as long to get us that incremental improvement that is nothing like what will be needed to get virtual reality TV (VRTV?)
But the end of the story had me wondering if they were serious.
The ministry plans to request a budget of more than 1 billion yen ($9 million) to help fund the project in the next fiscal year starting in April 2006.
Hands up all who think that kind of funding, even multiplied 15 times over, is going to do it. I thought so.
Google is amazing. I typed in "money spent on HDTV research" and found this from the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. It was published in 1990. The words are those of MIT researcher William F. Schreiber.
People have tried to estimate how much the Japanese have spent on HDTV--some say $500 million, others say $1 billion. That may seem like a lot of money, but General Motors spent $3 billion to introduce the Saturn automobile. Any new model car from Detroit costs $1 billion to introduce. A Boeing 747 costs $150 million. Each TV network is a $4 billion operation, and all the networks together are smaller than NYNEX. So, in those terms, a billion dollars isn't much money.
A billion yen is even less.
Posted by William Polley at August 19, 2005 11:43 PM
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