Intel’s Paul Otellini says we’ll all be making our own 3-D TV videos

The drumbeat around 3-D viewing is relentless at the Consumer Electronics Show. Big companies such as LG Electronics, Sharp, Samsung, Panasonic, Sony and Nvidia devoted considerable air time at their events to gush about 3-D, which was a dud until James Cameron’s 3-D film Avatar became a giant hit in the theaters.
And now Paul Otellini, chief executive of Intel, showed off a lot of 3-D demos in his keynote speech this afternoon. They looked pretty slick, a lot like viewing movies in a big theater. But Otellini says that technology will filter into the mainstream, turning us all into 3-D videographers.
Otellini showed a scenario where a family could use a 3-D stereoscopic camcorder, which has two cameras tied together. The family takes the video and loads it on the PC. Then the power user in the family can add effects to the video to make it look sharper when viewed with 3-D glasses. They can then convert them to be displayed on a TV set so the family can watch it. They can also share the video with friends on YouTube, who can watch it in 3-D.
To transfer a ton of 3-D video from one place to another, such as from a computer to a TV, takes a lot of bandwidth that current computers don’t have, even with the newly launched Universal Serial Bus Superspeed (USB 3.0). So Intel is working on Intel Light Peak, a next-generation data transfer technology that will transfer data at 100 gigabits a second. Current USB 3.0 can transfer data at 4 gigabits per second, or 10 times the theoretical speed of USB 2.0. The Light Peak technology is fast enough transfer a Blu-ray movie in less than 30 seconds, Otellini said.
Intel loves 3-D because it can chew up an enormous amount of computing power, Otellini said. And Intel is generating a lot of that. Today, it released 25 new processors under its Core i3, i5 and i7 brand names, as well as new Atom processors for smartphones, netbooks and other small gadgets that operate on low power.
The 3-D wave is starting in a big way, led by James Cameron’s Avatar movie. Otellini said there were 20 3-D movies released in 2009 and 50 more would be released in 2010 (slight different from what Jeffrey Katzenberg of DreamWorks Animation said). It takes a huge amount of processing power to render the 3-D movies. Otellini said that it took more than 40 million rendering hours to make the fourth Shrek movie, which launches in May and is the first one in the series that is in 3-D. That’s nine times the amount of computing hours compared to the original Shrek movie in 2001.
Sports events such as the World Cup, special interest channels such as the Discovery Channel, and other shows which are being created in 3-D will bring the trend from the movies into the home, with 3-D TV. And at some point, perhaps sooner than you think, we’ll all be creating 3-D videos. (There are already 150,000 3-D clips on YouTube). That’s what Otellini says.