Synthetic and natural hybrid coding for interactive broadcast TV

We describe some aspects of synthetic and natural hybrid coding for future developments in interactive broadcast TV. We show some hardware components in order to provide a basis for discussion. One problem we are dealing with is to reconstruct natural 3D objects as arbitrarily shaped 3D video objects. The intention is to improve scene realism. The computation of 3D video objects offers a variety of possibilities in current computer graphics. Interactivity is one of the most important tasks in the development of 3D-applications since it allows for entering new markets, e.g. interactive TV-broadcast. The MPEG-4 standard offers a variety of possibilities to cover these aspects.