At last April’s National Association of Broadcasters Expo, the video images shown in the southeast corner of the NICT booth were probably the smallest, grainiest, and hardest to see in the 87-year history of the NAB convention. They might also have been the most exciting.

NICT is Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communication Technology, a first-time exhibitor, and they proved quite capable of producing large, gorgeous, easy-tosee video. At the northwest corner of their booth, for example, they showed wall screens with so-called “4K” images (twice the maximum resolution of HDTV in each direction).

Those weren’t the only 4K images at NAB, and 2009 wasn’t the first 4K-images year. But NICT’s 4K images were different.

One demonstration showed 4K being recorded and played back from an inexpensive, consumer-type computer with no hiccups, thanks to a NICT-developed frame memory. But perhaps the term “NICT-developed” could be misinterpreted.

BACKSTORY
NICT was incorporated in 2004 through a merger of two previous research organizations, and they, in turn,

NICT’s Multi-Sensory Interaction System is operated by a user wearing 3-D glasses and headphones, manually moving a stylus. When the stylus “touches” a virtual object, the sound of the contact is heard, and the surface of the object is felt.

also had ancestors. The Institute’s timeline can be traced back to 1896, when Japan’s Ministry of Communications’ Electrotechnical Laboratory began work on radio.

Today, NICT has 13 major facilities throughout Japan, but it collaborates with corporations, universities, and other labs both in Japan and elsewhere. Consider, for example, another 4K-video demonstration — Interactive Panoramic Video Technologies, a project of NTT Cyber Space Laboratories.

In this case, the views of multiple cameras are synthesized into a giant, beyond-HDTV image. A special bit-rate reduction system allows delivery to homes, where viewers can select the resolution of the image they’d like, and can zoom in and move around the larger panorama at will. NAB show-goers could try it, using new remote-control technologies as well.

Around the corner of the booth, they could try a Multi-Sensory Interaction System. Wearing 3-D glasses and headphones, they were each handed a stylus positioned in midair. The glasses showed a 3D image of a sculpted copper “mirror” excavated from an ancient Japanese tomb, with an image of the stylus superimposed above it. When the user “touched” the stylus to the virtual object, the sound of the contact could be heard, and the stylus provided tactile feedback as well.

If the stylus was “rubbed” on a rough part of the virtual artifact, the user would see, hear, and feel the roughness. A smooth part, conversely, would provide visual, aural, and tactile feedback of the smoothness. A big bump would actually force the user’s hand up and over the bump, and it was also possible to “push” the artifact to flip it over.

On the opposite side of the booth, one could walk through a three-dimensional landscape using only one’s ears as “radiated” loudspeakers created the acoustic environment. One could listen between the flute player and string player, for example, or in front of both, or over one, etc.

Then there was gCubik, a small cube that could be rotated in one’s hand while looking at the object inside. There was, however, no object and nothing visible inside. The illusion was created by display surfaces and motion and attitude sensors.

The Floating Touch Display seemed, at first glance, almost trivial. An optical system created a floating image of a dandelion in its mature phase, the sort of image one could get with the parabolic-mirror systems sold in novelty stores. If one flicked a finger at the dandelion, however, its seeds would fly off in the direction of, and appropriate to the strength of, the flick.

That wasn’t the only NICT demonstration that seemed mundane under cursory examination. Consider, for example, the Glasses-Free 3D HD Display. In its small theater, it appeared, at first, to be a large, autostereoscopic LCD or plasma panel. And, like such displays, it had viewing “sweet spots.” Unlike any stereoscopic display, however, it allowed viewers to see around objects by moving their heads. The version demonstrated “greatly surpasses 100 million pixels.” For reference, 1920 x 1080 HDTV is about two million. And NICT personnel described a version being installed in Japan that would have well over 400 million.

TECHNOLOGY’S COMING
Any one of the NICT exhibits demonstrated extraordinary technological achievements, and they also seemed ready for sale. But then there was the one in the southeast corner of their booth. It was clearly not ready for primetime. In fact, it seemed miraculous that it could have been moved to the NAB show floor at all.

A large optical table at the right side held a strange camera rig. In front was a small, illuminated turntable carrying some toys — the sort of thing any camera or lens manufacturer might use for demonstration purposes. Between it and the camera, however, were a series of lenses, one of them a planar lens array, like a flattened fly’s eye.

The camera itself was an “8K” ultra-high-definition model, with four times the highest resolution of HDTV in any direction. But its video signals were never seen. Instead, they fed a processor that calculated, based on the multiple viewpoints of the fly’s-eye lens, what interference patterns might have been created had the turntable been illuminated by laser light in traditional photochemical holography. Indeed, just outside the exhibit area, a photochemical hologram on a wall showed what NICT was trying to achieve.

A monitor showed what the interference pattern looked like — just some noise to a human’s visual system. But the patterns (one for each primary color) were also fed to tiny LCDs mounted on the other large optical table.

The LCDs were “read” by lasers (again, one for each primary color), which, with reference beams, reconstructed the light wavefronts hitting the camera. And, if one stood just right (a large arrow pointed the way), there it was: a tiny, grainy, difficult to see three-dimensional image of what the camera was shooting. It was not a stereoscopic image; you could actually look around the object, above, or below it.

Mark Schubin is a frequent contributor to NewBay Media’s technical publications.

[This article originally appeared in the May issue of TV Technology, a NewBay Media publication.]