Surround Vision is just out of the box

photo credit: Surround Vision

A new technology, Surround Vision, can use your Smartphone to view an image not yet on the main screen of your TV. Imagine being able to see different camera angles of a news cast by just pointing your cell phone. You could see all the shot footage from different cameras that never makes the main screen.

Surround Vision is just out of the box

Surround Vision is intended to work with standard, Internet-connected handheld devices. If you want to see what’s happening to the left or right of the edge of your television screen, you simply point your cell phone in that direction and an image would pop up on the screen of your cell phone. This is all done without affecting what everyone else in the room is seeing on the television screen. You could “tune in” to different camera angles of the same football play from the Super Bowl for an enhanced view of the play.

Santiago Alfaro, a graduate student in the lab of Media Lab research scientist Michael Bove, took the concept of surround sound and came up with surround vision. “If you’re watching TV and you hear a helicopter in your surround sound,” Alfaro says, “wouldn’t it be cool to just turn around and be able to see that helicopter as it goes into the screen?”

Imagine where this technology will take us. I thought IMAX was pretty cool. I can imagine being in a theater with 3 screens around me and surround vision enveloping me. Then take it a step further and make it 3D. Now I’m getting vertigo. We can call it Surround 3D. I had enough trouble with sitting still in the 3D of Avatar. It would definitely be the total experience. Wow! What do you think?