News Releases

Eye-Popping Streaming Film Debuts

By Xeni Jardin
Wired News Staff Writer

San Diego, CA, September 30, 2005 - What do high-definition video of seafloor volcanoes and avant-garde Japanese digital cinema have in common? They’re both examples of the kinds of bandwidth-intensive information that can be streamed live from remote locations, over ultra-fast optical networks.

And both were demonstrated this week at iGrid 2005. The week-long computing conference, which showcases research in high-performance, multi-gigabit networks, was held at UC San Diego’s new Calit2 (California Institute of Technology and Information Technology) facility.

“When you can stream content this high-resolution, you can start thinking about movie theaters as a place where live events can be displayed - sports, fashion, politics, anything,” said Laurin Herr of Pacific Interface, an Oakland-based tech consulting firm that produced the demonstration. “What color film did to audiences used to viewing black and white, what stereo sound did to audiences used to hearing mono, high-definition digital cinema will do to us.”

Jaw-dropping demos abounded, promising just as much for scientists as for Hollywood.

One experiment on Tuesday featured the first-ever live, IP-based transmission of high-definition video from the bottom of the sea.

HD video cameras nearly two miles below the ocean surface and 200 miles off the Washington/Canada coastline relayed impossibly crisp live footage of sea life near 700-degree Fahrenheit volcanic thermal vents known as “black smokers” on the Pacific floor.

Back at iGrid, that 20-mbps MPEG2 video stream was projected in such high resolution that close-ups of tiny, translucent tubeworms the size of quarters filled the entire wall-sized screen. It was as if the theater itself became a gigantic microscope.

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