The Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California has formed a 3D working group chaired by a representative from Dolby Labs. It aims to define the core issues for driving 3D content into the home.

The group is at least the fourth to convene this year to study the opportunities and challenges around 3DTV. The effort comes at a time of rising interest among Hollywood movie makers in generating more 3D content for the cinema and finding new outlets for it in the home.

The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) is forming a task force that will set the stage for an effort to define a stereo 3D mastering standard for content viewed in the home. The Consumer Electronics Association will investigate the possibility of setting standards for 3DTV systems at a meeting in October.

The work at the USC lab "is complementary and synergistic with SMPTE's new task force," said David Wertheimer, executive director of ETC which played an active role in the definition of a standard for digital movie theaters. The USC lab has backing from a number of Hollywood studios as well as a handful of technology companies.

The ETC will host the initial meeting of SMPTE's 3DTV group in August. As part of that effort the university lab is courting technology companies to install a broad range of existing 3DTV gear at the lab for tests and demonstrations

"Several of the studios have asked us to accelerate the building out of the 3-D-in-the-home aspect," of ETC's content lab, "so that they can have a place in Los Angeles where they can bring their to-be-released content to view it using existing and emerging 3D displays, formats, and technologies," said Wertheimer.

ETC was founded by George Lucas in 1993 with the goal of bringing technology and entertainment companies together to collaborate on the future of entertainment technology. Sponsors include Disney, MGM, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Viacom/Paramount, and Warner Bros. as well as Cisco Systems, Deluxe Laboratories, Lucasfilm, and Thomson.

"There are no standards in this [3DTV] space today, and there needs to be close link between the technology and entertainment companies" to forge such standards, said Wertheimer.

"I think 3D in the home will be really big," added Wertheimer, former president of Paramount Digital Entertainment. "The studios are banking more and more on 3D production, and market forces make it desirable for them to have secondary outlets for that content."

A separate group, the 3D@Home consortium has gathered members from as many as 30 companies this year to pursue a roughly similar goal of exploring the challenges and opportunities behind 3DTV.

"It's a whole who's who because there is high level interest from major companies in this topic," said Chris Chinnock, president of market watcher Insight Media (Norwalk, Conn.) that convened the group which includes Disney, Philips, Samsung and Sony among its members.

The 3D@Home group is completing work on its legal structure so it can start staffing working groups to sort through issues raised by a wide variety of existing approaches to stereoscopic 3DTV. "We all see the need to do this as fast as we can but there are a lot of companies involved and a lot of information to sift though," said Chinnock.

"You are seeing a lot of overlapping activity here because everyone sees this problem," he added.

The 3D@Home group aims to draft needs and requirements statements for 3DTV, and lets groups such as SMPTE and CEA write standards. "We hope to do a lot of the leg work for people like SMPTE," Chinnock said.

Insight Media projects as many as 28 million 3DTVs of various types could be sold each year by 2012, up from less than 300,000 systems sold last year.