With the London 2012 Olympic Games just 51 days away, what can viewers expect?

During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, one of the most watched events in TV history, viewers witnessed some interesting tech feats:underwater skateboard cameras, rain preventing missiles, and the 8,000-fps camera, just to name a few.

How can London top that?

For starters, Panasonic Corporation of North America and the NBC Sports group have teamed up to bring viewers over 200 hours of 3D Olympic coverage in what will be a first for the Olympic Games.

Panasonic’s 3D production technology, the AG-3dP1 Integrated Twin-Lens 3D Camera Recorder, will make this possible. The AG-3dP1 has a 17-times twin-lens, zoom-lens system that ranges from wide-angle to telephoto in order to adjust to different scenarios. The opening and closing ceremonies, as well as diving and gymnastics, are just some of the events scheduled to be broadcast in 3D. The technology will be available in the U.S. to distributors who carry Olympic coverage on cable and satellite.

For the athletes, technological improvements will aid in effectiveness and accuracy.

Even if a factory inspection system doesn’t need 3D stereo vision, the tool can simplify 2D image processing. Two synchronized 2D cameras can create stereo 3D images that help adjust for different heights or depths of objects going down the line or being guided on and off pallets.

Combining stereo 3D with smart camera technology in a rugged handheld system, such as QuantumVision’s Hammerhead, is a relatively new idea.

“In many applications, vision system engineers don’t really care about the stereo 3D info, like robots with sophisticated 3D vision that already has much higher accuracy in the Z dimension than stereo 3D can provide,” Robert Blenis,

a 14 per cent decline from the same quarter a year previously. That led to Panasonic suffering an operating loss of £1.6bn.

Panasonic is not expecting things to get better soon, with the firm announcing a downward revision of its revenue estimate for its full year 2012

Fabless mobile multimedia chip company Movidius Ltd has announced it has partnered with Toshiba Electronics Europe and developed a reference design of 3-D image capture system for integration by camera module makers.

In the design the MA1178 video processing chip from Movidius (Dublin, Ireland) operates with two MIPI standard streams from Toshiba image sensors at up to 8-Mpixels resolution. The chip works with EDoF (extended depth of field) cameras and can compensate for camera sensor differences or minor misalignments, Movidius said.

When it comes to producing 3D TV content, the more cameras that are used to simultaneously record one shot, the better.

At least two cameras (or one camera with two lenses) are necessary to provide the depth information needed to produce the left- and right-eye images for conventional 3D, but according to researchers at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, at least four cameras will be needed if we ever want to achieve glasses-free 3D TV.

New tech makes four-camera 3D shooting possible
http://www.gizmag.com/stan-calibrates-four-3d-cameras/19831/

At least two cameras (or one camera with two lenses) are necessary to provide the depth information needed to produce the left- and right-eye images for conventional 3D, but according to researchers at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, at least four cameras will be needed if we ever want to achieve glasses-free 3D TV. Calibrating that many cameras to one another could ordinarily take days, however … which is why Fraunhofer has developed a system that reportedly cuts that time down to 30 to 60 minutes.

The STAN assistance system ensures that the optical axes, focal lengths and focal points are the same for each camera. That way, as the viewer moves their head, the combined shots will all look like one three-dimensional shot.

The four-camera setup is already in use by members of the MUSCADE project, which is a consortium dedicated to advancing glasses-free 3D TV technology.