In light of Sony’s recent announcement of its HMZ – a personal, wearable 3D theatre – it seems the sky’s the limit when it comes to technological developments in the movie and home entertainment business. But it’s developments like this that give hope to accessible cinema fans of what the future holds in terms of new technologies for accessing captions and audio description.
There’s no argument that there’s been a lot of contention over the technology now being rolled out in cinemas in Australia and overseas, specifically with captions. The closed caption system, CaptiView, has received mixed reviews - generally positive from people that have never had access to captions in a cinema and negative from people who have gone from an open captioned cinema complex to this closed alternative.
Let’s remember though that at this point in time Captiview is the technology best suited to our systems.
In an ideal world, every cinema would have a screen or two that permanently screens open captioned movies but two things need to be understood: firstly, hate to say it, this is not an ideal world and secondly, that the industry as a whole is moving to closed captions.
Despite the mixed reactions, the move to closed captions is viewed by many as a win-win situation: a win for the cinemas which can accommodate patrons who wish to attend an accessible session but don’t require the technology, and a win for patrons who can attend sessions every day of the week, many times and watch a range of movies.
As for CaptiView, it is one of only two technologies available at the moment for delivering closed captions that is compatible with the digital movie file servers our major exhibitors have installed. Installing digital movie file servers is part of the universal move to digital cinema. The servers the Australian major chains have gone with are a Doremi product, as is CaptiView. The other product compatible with Doremi for closed caption delivery is the Rear Window Captioning system (RWC) by WGBH. RWC is a more expensive product and the screen is considerably larger than the CaptiView unit.
What the future could hold
Firstly, there’s the HMZ – a personal, head-mounted display for 3D movies, music videos and games. Admittedly I’d currently consider it a bit fanciful for movie fans that just want to see good old captions and listen to the audio description. Bells and whistles just aren’t your average accessible movie fan’s thing. We already have audio description delivered via headsets, but the HMZ hints that captioned movie delivery on a headset is not as far off as we might imagine.
A more feasible Sony product that’s close to being market-ready is the subtitle glasses. User testing has recorded that there’s no need for refocusing, which is an issue for some with the CaptiView. The lightweight unit can be worn over standard glasses and auto adjusts its brightness to lighting conditions. Although not commercialised yet, Sony is already thinking of the glasses’ future capabilities, including simultaneous conversation transcription so that deaf people could read what’s being said in the course of a conversation. This personal device is due for commercialisation as early as 2012.
USL’s CCS (Closed Caption System) is a new competitor to CaptiView and RWC although it’s yet to make the inroads in exhibition as CaptiView and RWC have.
The USL system is compliant with the necessary standards to work with the Doremi servers and comes with flexible options of glasses or a separate viewing display that is clipped to your cinema seat. There is little feedback available on the USL system, but it seems that the pole on which the unit sits does not allow the viewer to manoeuvre the unit in the same manner as the CaptiView unit.
It’s still early days in the move to digital cinema but with new equipment being earnestly developed, this can only bode well for the user. More products on the market can drive prices down and provide feasible choices for exhibitors to offer in their cinemas. A cinema environment that offers not just choice of day, time and movie, but also choice of access equipment, may not be as far off as we think.
Information on accessible cinema can be found on the Your Local Cinema website.
Top of page