Skip to content

Football like you’ve never seen it before

Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on linkedin
LinkedIn

Freeviewpoint television (FTV) is expected to become the ultimate 3D TV experience. With FTV, the viewer can choose from which angle and position to view a scene. Want to watch football from above, the East Wing, or with your fellow fans?  At the press of a button, with FTV you can. For FTV to work, the same scene needs to be captured from a number of different viewpoints and the virtual scenes in between generated. To broadcast the service requires a huge bandwidth, which on your mobile would quickly soak up all your data. Current mobile FTV frameworks cannot handle the broadcast capacity required and FTV has never been deployed over a specific cellular technology.

Terence Zarb (supervised by Dr Ing. Carl James Debono) proposed a framework to compress and transmit FTV to mobile devices. The system was adapted for the next generation long-term evolution (LTE) networks, currently available on high-end smartphones. To reduce bandwidth and reduce mobile phone workload, the FTV broadcast data is processed at the transmitting end, before it is sent over the mobile network. The physically captured views are transmitted. Depending on the user’s choice, the mobile phone either presents one of these views or generates an arbitrary viewpoint. By using the novel proposed framework, the bandwidth required was reduced by over 70% compared to current methods. It also provided a better viewing experience.

Taken together, the proposed framework can realistically be deployed on LTE networks, which means we might be seeing an incredibly innovative way of viewing sport, documentaries and maybe even films on our 3D TVs — is that enough to make you buy one?

Proposed framework to allow an incredible 3D video experience to be compressed and transmitted to mobile devices.
Proposed framework to allow an incredible 3D video experience to be compressed and transmitted to mobile devices.

This research was performed as part of a Masters of Science in Information and Communication Technology at the Faculty of Information and Communication Technology. The research is partially funded by the Strategic Educational Pathways Scholarship Scheme (Malta). The scholarship is part-financed by the European Union – European Social Fund, under Operational Programme II – Cohesion Policy 2007-2013, “Empowering People for More Jobs and a Better Quality of Life”.

Author

More to Explore

Fostering Creativity and Community: The ART Connect Project at the University of Malta Library

The Library is, in many ways, the beating heart of the University of Malta (UM). The pulse of intellectual life can be felt most profoundly amongst the quiet shelves lined with books and the many students and academics lining the Library’s work desks with their noses deep in their projects. In this sense, the Library is also symbolic of the University’s overall health and vitality, so it is important to balance serious work with serious play.

The evolution of the ART Connect Project has been a journey of dedication and transformation. Inspired by the vision of new librarians and a desire to revamp the Library’s decor, what was once a seed of an idea has now matured into a vibrant platform for artistic expression, collaboration, and community building.

The ART Connect Project aims to connect people through creativity, foster collaboration, and transform spaces, inviting artists and art enthusiasts to celebrate the power of art.

Meeting Challenges Halfway at the Malta Book Festival 2023

Malta boasts 58 registered publishing entities, hosting hundreds of authors writing books across a wide swathe of genres and formats. These numbers emerge from an NSO survey into the book industry, conducted on the basis of the year 2021. Effectively, we could say that there are ‘more authors than churches’ in Malta, with over 700 authors populating the National Book Council’s database.

This hints at a varied industry, the stakeholders of which all fall under the remit of the National Book Council, which seeks to assist, support, and represent Maltese authors and publishers, as well as related industry stakeholders such as translators and illustrators. While the Maltese context does have its own particularities, neither is it immune to the industry’s wider, global realities, a case in point being the price hike on paper caused by the war in Ukraine, which continues to be felt across the board. Maltese publishers must also bear the brunt of this unfortunate phenomenon.

The National Book Council continues to advocate for increased governmental support to aid publishers, whether in this particular challenge or others, and it also offers direct financial aid through the Malta Book Fund, which last year issued a grand total of €120,000 to various industry stakeholders, targeting projects of high cultural value which may not have a straightforward route to market success.

But while some challenges may be met halfway through financial incentives, others require a systemic — or cultural — shift in attitude from all parties involved, which takes a certain degree of workshopping to be borne out. The slow uptake of ebooks bears pondering (the NSO survey saw 146 new ebooks issued in Malta in 2021, contrasted with printed counterparts of 418 in the same year), as does the worryingly high number of authors published without adequate contracts in place.

Maximising Solar Panel Efficiency: The DustPV Project

The DustPV project, led by Prof. Ing. Joseph Micallef, aims to determine the optimal timing for cleaning solar panels using innovative sensor technology and weather data analysis. By addressing the challenges of dust accumulation on photovoltaic panels, the project seeks to enhance solar panel performance and contribute to Malta’s renewable energy goals.

No comment yet, add your voice below!


Add a Comment