Now two people can watch a different show on the same TV

One of the most interesting demonstrations at CES 2012 is Samsung’s Dual-View HD television concept, which comes to market in 2012 with its latest super OLED Smart TV. Harnessing the available 120 Hz refresh speeds and active shutter glasses like the ones used for 3DTV (but also fitted with personal headphones), two people can watch the main television screen yet view completely different channels. Two 60 frame per second video streams are being displayed simultaneously but the glasses actively filter out one of them, depending which channel you ‘tune’ to, using a button on the glasses. In the demonstration, one person watched a movie while another watched a music concert.

A Samsung spokesman reckons the technology will have its biggest impact in gaming. At present, two-person games use a split screen so both players can see what they are doing within the game, but that means you play in half a screen and can also see what your opponent’s play through their point of view. Dual-View will provide each player with a completely separate experience, watching a full screen of action instead of a half screen, and unable to see anything of what their opponent sees. Nevertheless, the company chose to demonstrate this as a TV concept and you have to wonder whether there is an application here for personal interactive experiences on the main screen, like when one of the users wants to click the ‘Red Button’ to watch a longer form version of an advertisement without interrupting what the other person is doing.

There are technical limitations to what is possible. Samsung thinks that even if you had a 240 Hz television, the delays between frames would get too high to expand this beyond a choice of two channels. And if you both want to watch Pay TV then you would need two separate set-top boxes to enable simultaneous channel viewing. Viewers have to wear glasses and the audio through the personal headphones (which rest on the glasses arms, next to your ear) do not provide the high quality immersive audio experience many consumers would expect. But despite all that, this is such a smart innovation it deserves to have a winning TV-based application to exploit it!