Coming To A Screen Near You: High-Def Digital Cinema

Wired: 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.”