Thomas Wiegand
Chair of Image Communication Department, Technische Universität Berlin; Head of Image Processing Department, Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institut Berlin, Germany
Breaking The Wall of the Flat World of TV. What Three Dimensional Television Pictures Will Look Like.
3D – isn’t that the funny way of watching movies wearing clutzy glasses? For now that may be true, but in only fifteen years time, television as we know it will be over: we will be watching it in a radically new three-dimensional form. Then, we will look back at 2D television the way we look at old black-and-white movies today: the remains of another era. Thomas Wiegand (1970), professor at the Technische Universität Berlin and head of the Image Processing Department of the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications Heinrich Hertz Institute is working on transforming television – and our viewing habits. Having studied Electrical Engineering at the universities of Hamburg and Erlangen- Nuremburg, he quickly became one of the pioneers writing the code for H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, the standard for video compression. His forays into coding, visualizing and streaming 3D environments are regarded as the most promising developments in the telecommunications standardization sector. In 2009, Wiegand received the Innovation Award of Vodafone Foundation for Research in Mobile Communications. Watch him transform our ways of seeing. No clutzy glasses required.
