Interactive virtual view video (IVVV) - The bridge between immersive TV and 3D-TV

Depth perception in images and video has been a relevant research issue for years, with the main focus on the basic idea of "stereoscopic" viewing. However, it is well known from the literature that stereovision is only one of the relevant depth cues and that motion parallax, as well as color, brightness and geometric appearance of video objects are at least of the same importance - with the individual influence being mainly dependent on the object distance. Thus, for depth perception it may sometimes be sufficient to watch pictures or movies on large screens with brilliant quality or to provide head-motion parallax viewing on conventional 2D displays. Based on this observation we introduce an open, flexible and modular immersive TV system that is backwards-compatible to today's 2D digital television and that is able to support a wide range of different 2D and 3D displays. The system is based on a three-stage concept and aims to add more and more depth cues at each addi tional layer.