Videoconferencing system to get across-Pacific test

SAN DIEGO — Scientists and engineers in the United States and Japan plan to test the world's highest-resolution videoconferencing system on this evening over a 9,000-mile optical network linking the University of California, San Diego, with Keio University in Tokyo.

The demonstration will allow those attending the iGrid 2005 scientific computing conference to watch an exchange between Yuichiro Anzai, the president of Keio, and Marye Anne Fox, the chancellor of the San Diego campus, on a theater display with four times the image resolution of today's HDTV technology.

The technology will use American and Japanese fiber networks that stretch from Tokyo to Chicago, and the data will be relayed to San Diego via an optical network connection in Seattle at speeds of a billion bits per second.

The high-speed network will feed the data to a state-of-the-art Sony camera that projects so-called 4K digital video, with images that are about 4,000 pixels across. When it is uncompressed at the receiving end, the video stream contains more than 6 billion bits per second.

Hollywood is on the verge of introducing an earlier generation of 2K digital video to theaters in the United States and Japan. But some in the industry believe that the 4K standard, which is still in the prototype stage, will be necessary to give theater viewers a significantly different experience from 35-millimeter film, today's standard cinema format, and to compete with HDTV screens in homes.

"What we're showing here is really important for Hollywood," said Laurin Herr, president of Pacific Interface, a technology consulting company based in Oakland, Calif., that is engineering the demonstration. "These same networks can be used to distribute other digital stuff such as live events, live concerts and sports."

The 4K demonstration is also important for film production and scientific work, Herr said, because studios increasingly shoot on one side of the world and edit and produce the film on the other. "Production has always been a team effort, but now the talent will be spread around the globe," he said.

Optical networks and high-resolution displays are also becoming mainstays of modern science. Scientific research increasingly involves the use of vast digital files, and the optical digital infrastructure that is emerging can be used to build computerized scientific instruments that essentially straddle the globe.

The iGrid 2005 event will feature an array of scientific visualization demonstrations, ranging from HDTV images from the depths of the ocean to the distribution of cosmic-ray data from Tibet.