The way we watch TV in the future is likely to change significantly from today. Tileable, interactive TV "wallpaper" will dominate the room, with wrap-around screens that recruit your peripheral vision to create a truly immersive experience. What's more, you'll be able to use part or all of the screen for different shows, movies, web pages or Twitter timelines.
Wall-sized, total-immersion TVs will change how you watch your favourite shows
THINK your flat-screen television is big? You ain't seen nothing yet.
But how will you organise and control all this on your giant, immersive screen?
This is the kind of question that News Digital Systems (NDS), a maker of pay-TV transmission technology, says broadcasters ought to be asking over the next decade as wall-covering TVs become a practical reality that goes beyond dim, low-resolution projectors or giant, power-hungry single flat screens. "It's amazing how science fiction has accurately predicted where our future television technology is going," says Simon Parnall, vice-president of technology at NDS in Staines, UK.
The firm's latest idea is called Surfaces and is predicated on the fact that the next generation of flat-screen TVs, based on organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays, will drop in price considerably in the next five to 10 years. OLED display panels have a great advantage: unlike LCD screens, they need no side lighting - so the picture display area can go right up to the screen edge. That means they can be placed next to each other to create a continuous display.
"We will be able to make this OLED flat-panel technology tileable. And these can be any shape you like, not just rectangular arrays," Parnall told London'sFuture World Symposium in April.
The first 1.4-metre OLED TVs, made by LG Electronics and Samsung of South Korea, will arrive on the market later this year. They are likely to cost around £8000 at first, says John Kempner, buyer for TV and video at the John Lewis Partnership, a UK department-store chain. But he also thinks the trend is for "fairly rapid price deflation" and expects the cost to fall below £3000 within two years. Models costing £1000 or less should be available in five to 10 years.
Using six OLED panels, NDS has constructed a 3.6-metre-by-1.4-metre prototype screen that, when not in use, simply displays the pattern on the wall behind it. "It's ambient," says Parnall. A video server pushes high-definition content to the screen under the control of an ordinary browser on the user's smartphone or computer, which also lets people choose where on the screen they want their video, web, social media or Skype. Some of today's TVs can already be controlled with an app in addition to a remote, says Kempner.
The prototype has been screening the X Factor talent show in the centre of the screen, with web content on each contestant to the right, a voting widget beneath it, and Twitter timelines of audience reactions to the left.
Central to the experience is how much immersion viewers want. A family watching a movie might choose deep immersion and make the film cover most of the screen - with perhaps a social media comment stream below it.
For shallow immersion, news might be displayed in the middle, with any Skype calls or social media and web content dotted around the periphery. Separate audio channels could be beamed wirelessly to each user's phone or headset.
It's not just NDS that is working to change how we watch TV. Daniel Novy and Michael Bove at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing an immersive system called Infinity-by-Nine - a reference to the standard 16:9 wide-screen aspect ratio.
"We take advantage of some perceptual tricks," says Bove. "Peripheral vision isn't sensitive to detail but it is to motion, and the brain really wants to make a consistent explanation of what your peripheral vision sees and what your central, or foveal, vision sees." They use machine vision software to analyse, say, a movie and then generate, in real time, a moving low-resolution pattern that resembles the image on the screen. This gets projected onto the surrounding walls and ceiling. "The viewer isn't supposed to look directly at the added imagery, but its presence hugely increases the perceived sense of immersion into what's on the screen," says Bove.
It works because while colour and detail perception is diminished in our peripheral vision, motion sensitivity in those visual margins remains strong. So Infinity-by-Nine simply has to move the low-resolution pattern at the same speed as the main image to enhance the viewers' feeling of wrap-around immersion.
"While the effect might be strongest from a more central viewing position, it is still quite powerful from other seating positions. We have several couches in the room where this system runs, and when we leave a film playing we often come back to find people sitting on all of them, and on the floor," says Bove.
Still, too much information can be distracting, even off-putting, for some viewers. That is why Valentin Heun, also at MIT, is experimenting with a system called FocalSpace (pictured below), which uses Microsoft Kinect depth cameras to sense where the viewer is looking and dynamically enhance the contrast and colour of the imagery there, making those parts of the screen clearer and easier to concentrate on.
Kinect and systems like it could also control the NDS Surfaces, perhaps giving a greater level of control than an app. Samsung already allows gesture and voice control on its recently launched ES8000 smart TVs. "Gestures are a more natural way to do this," says Chris Wild, chief technology officer at interactive software firm Altran Praxis of Bath, UK. "Hand movements and gaze offer much more scope and a wider grammar for fine control of large screens than smartphones."
