Video opera? What would you do with huge bandwidth and millions of pixels?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Web browser, People, Futures, Networking, HP, Internet on
One of the highlights of the Future in Review conference is the chance to go to the supercomputing visualization lab at the University of California in San Diego, CalIT2. It’s run by Larry Smarr, who used to run the National Computing Supercomputing Applications where told one of his graduate students, Marc Andreessen, to write a visual browser for the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee was working on over at CERN. When they showed NCSA Mosaic off, “everybody told us nobody needed it”, he says.
Given how wrong, that turned out to be, it’s worth keeping an eye on what Smarr thinks is important – bandwidth and pixels. Not content with the bandwidth of Internet2, he’s been putting together a multigigabit network connecting universities around the world for sharing data and collaborating over video conferencing. And making video real enough to suspend your disbelief means a lot of pixels; the 60-foot screen in the CalIT2 lecture theatre has four times the resolution of HD, the standard digital cinema will use when the movie theatres work out how to make money from it. To kick off the evening, Smarr invites Microsoft’s Curtis Wong to show off the 12 terabytes of images in the new World Wide Telescope, a map of the sky that zooms from star fields to galaxies to the solar systems coalescing inside them out of dust, fading into infra-red and wavelengths that show more structures.
The 30″ screens on most desks around the lab are dwarfed by the 200 megapixel video wall - eleven rows of five 30″ Dell screens crammed side by side to make one giant display with 100 times the resolution of HD. There are displays that wrap around the edges of a small room, stretching over your head and powered by eight HD projectors, that show us the surface of Mars in 50 million pixels rather than the 2 million pixels from the Word Wide Telescope.
It’s not size to prove screens can keep getting bigger; Larry Smarr thinks we need the bigger view. “We’ve artificially limited our brain by this stupid million pixels on a screen and we’ve unblocked that.” So how much more can we see; is there a limit? “Reality! You don’t see everything you think you see - it’s not as simple as pixels. There’s a limit to what you can resolve spatially, above 24 frames per second you don’t really see more. But the brain is capable of absorbing about 1gigabit per second, 24 bits deep 16 million colours. ”
From medical images to satellite maps, there are plenty of images to enjoy at that size. You can see the intricate details inside cancer cells or watch winter spread over the world. You can stand inside a building that exists only as a CAD diagram and walk through lifesize doors to see if the layout works. You can step forward to see the hidden sketch under a Leonardo painting, revealed by infrastructure-red photography and displayed so you can see every line. Or you can watch life-size opera live from the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, or the opening ceremony of the Nobel prize from Japan and fill like you’re almost there. Every candle flame, every reflection, the brocade patterns on every kimono, the expression on every face.
These are the technologies that are coming to office video conferencing if you have the network bandwidth. Smarr advised HP on developing the Halo system and he’s putting in a Cisco TelePresence room at CalIT2 for academics to use for collaborations. The commodity hardware and open source software that powers the high-resolution screens isn’t as expensive as those. Each screen of what Larry Smarr calls the optiputer - systems connected by optical fibre that make up a worldwide computer system - costs about $2,000. But of course the bandwidth is what really raises the price tag. Cisco TelePresence needs about 10Gbps; the big screen system is over ten times more.
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