NTT Sreams Super High Definition Video From Midwest toWest Coast Over High-Speed Network

Origin: CAnet-News
Date: October 30, 2002

Japan's Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) and the University of Southern California (USC) School of Cinema-Television, successfully demonstrated Super High Definition (SHD) full motion digital imagery streaming in real time from a server in Chicago to a projector in Los Angeles.

This was the world's first successful trial of long-distance transmission of SHD content over general-purpose IP networks.

SHD has four times the resolution of HDTV, and 24 times the resolution of standard definition video. Transmission of SHD via network requires sustainable high-speed connectivity of 1 Gbps over multiple "hops" without significant packet loss, delay or jitter.

The demonstration, done as part of Internet2's Fall 2002 Members Meeting in Los Angeles October 28-29, shows the potential for super high performance imaging and visualization applications over very high-speed networks.

The content, 3840 x 2048 SHD video, came from scientific instruments, computer graphics simulations, digitally scanned motion-picture films and digital still cameras. The imagery was successfully streamed from an NTT (Network Innovation Laboratories) content server at StarLight (the optical STAR TAP) the National Science Foundation-sponsored optical exchange for advanced networks in Chicago, over the Internet2 Abilene backbone, to the USC Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts.

The content, pre-compressed to 200-400 Mbps using an experimental JPEG 2000 SHD codec, was received in Zemeckis Center by an NTT real time decoder, then fed to NTT's prototype SHD frame-buffer and eight megapixel full-color D-ILA projector for display on a large screen.

For more information, contact:

Laura Wolf
Electronic Visualization Laboratory
University of Illinois at Chicago
laura@evl.uic.edu