A Java 3D Framework for Digital Television Set-top Box Master’s Thesis

ii ABSTRACT Author: Yongjun Zhang University: Helsinki University of Technology Laboratory: Telecommunication Software and Multimedia Department: Computer Science and Engineering Professership: T-111 Interactive Digital Media Name: A Java 3D Framework for Digital Television Set-top Box Date: 15.10.2003 Num. Pages: 56 Supervisor: Petri Vuorimaa Instructor: Pablo Cesar Digital television offers a revolutionary platform for future home entertainment. Based on this platform, many innovative services and applications are deployed, presenting unprecedent user experience to TV viewers. The success of 3D graphics applications in PC industry also motivates hardware and software vendors to introduce 3D applications in digital television. A generic 3D framework is crucial to make 3D applications interoperable in different hardware and software platforms. Idealy, this framework will abstract all the platform-specific 3D operations, which makes it possible to develop applications that could be ‘written once and executed anywhere’. The aim of this thesis is to implement such a framework to facilitate the development of 3D applications in digital television. Java is a widely adopted in digital television industry, mainly because Java provides excellent platform-indenpendency for cross platform applications. TVGL, the 3D library developed in this thesis, is also implemented in Java. Java native interface technology is used to connect the high level Java API layer with the low-level native 3D libraries. In addition, the framework also proivdes a skeleton application for developers to start with, and two sample applications are demonstrated. 3D applications demands hugh computing resources, while the hardware capability of a digital set-top box, the device that executes services and applications, is very limited. To study the feasibility of 3D in digital television, a survey on the mid-range set-top boxes in the market is conducted. The feasibility study and demos show that 3D lightweight applications are possible with current set-top box configurations. As a new framework, TVGL can evolve to be a standardized API, making its way in extending the current digital television standards and enriching the profile sets of current digital set-top boxes.