Panasonic are planning to release the fruits of product development at their advanced authoring laboratory in Hollywood in the shape of a consumer 3D Blu-ray player.

Overcoming a number of technical challenges, Panasonic are aiming to release a 3D Blu-ray deck some time in 2010. Their Universal City 3D labs have been working towards establishing a 3D Full HD (3D FHD) Blu-ray format and have been carrying out development work directly with Hollywood studios offering 3D title development services for 3D FHD Blu-ray titles.

Accommodating the extra storage capacity demands of a 3D stereoscopic image (1.5x that of a standard release), engineers at the Hollywood labs developed a new compression standard for 3D Blu-ray known as AVC multiview codec. This codec takes the form of a left channel encoded as usual to provide a 2D version of a film while the right channel offers the 3D effect.

Extra processing power on the 3D Blu-ray decks is set to double from today's standard players to cope with the demands of 3D. This extra processing power may result in extra benefits such as improved GUI and 3D disc menus.

Panasonic also plan to develop a Plasma 3D Full HD home theater system (which was demonstrated in prototype form at CES 2009), a 3D-ready digital cinema projector (Theatrical Dolby 3-D system) with a 380-inch screen theater for 3D HD picture quality evaluation, and a 3-D ready MPEG-4 AVC High Profile encoder.

Panasonic have not released any firm technical specifications or anticipated prices for their 3D blu-ray players but are planning to release a consumer product some time in 2010.