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NTT Streams High Definition Video

October 30, 2002 NTT Streams High Definition Video from Midwest to West Coast Over High-Speed Network Los Angeles, CA - 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 content server at StarLight, 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. Featured content included “A Diamond of Quaternionic Julia Sets” by Dan Sandin of EVL / UIC; “Billy Goat” by Kleiser Walczak Construction Company; “Voyage From Earth to the Virgo Cluster” and “Flight to the Milky Way Core” by Donna Cox, Bob Patterson and Stuart Levy of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; “Tomorrow’s Memory” by NTT Network Innovation Labs; and, “Blue Caviar” by Mikael Forsberg of the USC Cinema-Television School. About NTT Network Innovation Laboratories NTT Network Innovation Laboratories in Yokosuka, Japan, is affiliated with the NTT Science and Core Technology Laboratory Group, one of NTT’s three laboratory groups, and was established in 1999 to bring together a wide range of optics, wireless systems, network software and imaging researchers, and to cover all aspects of networking from the physical layer to the application layer. About StarLight StarLight, the optical STAR TAP, is an advanced optical infrastructure and proving ground for network services optimized for high-performance applications. StarLight, funded by the National Science Foundation, is being developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University, and the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, in partnership with Canada’s CANARIE and Holland’s SURFnet. Contact: Laura Wolf Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago laura@evl.uic.edu