I posted several times in the past news about cameras that you can wear and use to film snippets of your life. Most of the time it has been in relation to some research (HP one shot, MS myLifeBits) and the camera used was a sort of prototype.

HD camera for 400$ embedded in a sky mask

Now, I run onto Liquid Image, and let me tell you that I am impressed by the variety of mass market (read affordable) products they have embedding a camera in goggles of various shapes, including some for underwater snorkling and squba diving.

The quality of the movies taken is amazing and you don’t need to do anything. Just wear the goggles as you would for skiing or surfing and there you are. At the end of the day you can upload the movie to your media centre and share it with your friends.

And, of course, it is just a matter of time before you’ll be able to stream your own experience in HD wirelessly, thanks to advanced wireless networks like LTE.

I can easily imagine WiFi blanketing a ski slope to let people broadcast their run to their friends.

What is amazing is the easiness and the low cost! It can really become a new fancy for the new year. And just think about the amount of storage that will be needed to store all those clips. Not to mention the new apps that will spring up to manage those clips…

It is a visual world, and it is going to happen, ’cause we are visual animals.

Many applications could be developed if we have the high capacity Internet access provided by the optical fiber at home. One of them would be online high definition games with multiple players.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_eye

Star Trek Online Game

Nowadays, online games don’t exploit all our sight capability. The human vision is composed by binocular and peripherical vision, ranging from about 120 to 170 degrees, once we take into account the saccadic movement of the eye. On the vertical, we have a field of view of 135 degrees. Based on this information and assuming a 30-inch display and an observer at 30 cm from it, we would use just a field of 90×74 degrees.

http://www.icf.at/en/6000/how_much_bandwidth.html

According to the reference above, it would take about 15-20 Mbit/s to stream a single HD video but of course we can compress it to 10 Mbps without significant loss in quality. Now, imagine how much would be needed to simulate the feeling of immersion in an online game. This kind of game is rendered on a remote server that sends the HD video to the player. To have a sense of immersion in the game, fully exploiting our eyesight, we would need to receive at least three HD videos horizontally! And the double is needed to cover also the vertical! Thus we need about 60 Mbit/s to be immerse in game!

You might wonder about using a larger screen. Indeed moving to a 100″ screen would provide the sense of immersion in terms of vision angle. However, the HD resolution is too low with respect to the one of our eyes and if we were to look at such a big HD screen from a distance of 30 cm we would see plenty of pixels, red blue and green dots rather than a smooth image. To get  smooth image where no pixel is seen we need to move to the 4K standard (8 Mpixels) and that would require 70 Mbps of bandwidth.

Additionally, in many on line games, like point and shoot, what the player wants is the capability of looking in different directions, as he would do in a room by moving his head. This requires more screens. Whichever way you look at it true on line gamers are bandwidth hungry!

A lot of improvements need to be done in visual perception area and even more in what is related to games, to make this market more attractive. Of course, it is not just a matter of bandwidth, the careful design of the interface plays (!) a major role in this area.

Imagine to multiply your HD television 16 times. This is what NHK, the Japanese broadcaster has been working on in the last three years. Now they have managed to broadcast a performance of The Charlatains, a musical, from Tokyo to London in cooperation with the BBC, using  a fibre providing a capacity of 24Gbps. Not all that capacity was required, the transmission has to carry a 7680×4320 frame, that is 16 times better resolution than our current HD television (32 Mpixels vs 2 Mpixels).

The resolution is so high that at this time there are no screen that can support its display. In the experiment only one fourth of the signal transmitted was displayed on a 103 prototype screen. Our eyes can appreciate details up to an equivalent of 8 Mpixels, one fourth of what NHK is providing, so that even a higher resolution screen would be useless.

Clearly one might imagine some zooming and therefore the extra resolution would be appreciated but these are very marginal cases. One has to wonder why NHK is aiming at this resolution.

My take is that it will never (I know, never say never) become a mass market product. It may find application in theaters, and even that it is not going to happen soon. May be in the last part of this decade.

Before reaching that point we still have the 4k standard, the one with a resolution comparable to human eyes (8 Mpixels), and that may happen within 5 years (10 before becoming really a mass market proposition).

Anyhow, I would love to see this NHK marvel.

High Definition television is just starting to “percolate” in the mass market. Give it 5 years time and full HDTV will be the norm. It is surely a great step forward but people with the hobby of digital photography are not satisfied.

HDTV has 1080 rows of 1920 pixels each, that is a mere 2 Mpixel definition. Not impressive if you are comparing with the 8Mpixel that an average digital camera sports today!

All these megapixels turn out important when one prints a digital photo onto a photographic paper: here mass market printers can place much more than the 300 dots per inch that our eyes is able to detect (a 200 dot per inch is usually more than acceptable). By comparison an image on a video display has usually less than 100 dots per inch (HD definition on a 52” screen has about 50 dots per inch!).

It is therefore no surprise that photographers love paper…

The new 4k video format (four thousands dot per line, also called movie format because it is used for digital movie filming) leads to 100 dots per inch on a 52” screen, still much less than paper, however the brightness associated to the light emitted by a screen (papers reflect light, remember how we always said that slides where better than paper….) makes this resolution almost as good as it gets from the point of view of our eyes.

In Japan, NHK is working o a 32 Mpixel screen (8000 dots per line, 4000 lines) that would result in a 200 dots per inch on a 52” screen.

The problem is that today’s video technology doesn’t allow the squeezing of so many dots in a “video” inch…

Then, there is the problem of transmitting all those bits to the screen for being displayed.

In the next posts I am going to discuss these aspects and to show how their solution is going to enable a fantastic ecosystem where digital photography can be the driver to evolution in telecommunications.