Big Bang

When people talk about new opportunities for content creators, they often mean the lower-resolution streams that run through the Web and mobile device pipelines.

To this end, fine minds have been solving issues of bandwidth, throughput, compression, last miles, handshakes, and — perhaps most importantly — revenue models. People spend time thinking about interactive video, non-linear video, short video, push video, business video — all the types of video communication that are enabled by the free spaces and small file sizes of the Web.

But other fine minds have been taking on similar challenges in the world of high resolution. This point was driven home at the annual Visual Effects Society (VES) conference and festival in Los Angeles this month, as it is in our cover story.

At the festival, the annual celeb-in-residence was Doug Trumbull. While Trumbull certainly earned his place with traditional visual effects work for films (2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner), his career also anticipated today's content free-for-all by many years. As one of the pioneers of location-based attractions (Back to the Future The Ride) and founder of Showscan, he moved visual effects off of traditional screens, onto unique surfaces, and into entirely different realms of storytelling.

This type of thing is in style now. 3D, for example, is having yet another resurgence and this time it might actually stick. Even digital signage is starting to look like real content. Two things are converging that make it possible to imagine that video might finally break the confines of cinema and television screens. One is an appetite for interactivity that has blown apart the stereotype of passive couch potatoes. The prognosticators who assumed audiences would be slow to “lean forward,” that they wouldn't respond to non-linear storytelling and wouldn't get involved, underestimated the power of self-absorption to overcome inertia.

The other important force is image display. In my years working in production for theme parks and museums, I got to see the early evolution of digital display and it was both amazing and deeply disappointing. Now it is just amazing. At the VES conference, attendees saw photographs of a display with 12,000 lines of horizontal resolution. They saw video infused into a massive glass wall on the side of a building, projected onto water and mirrors, painted onto floors, spheres, and ceilings. They saw video holograms that could interact plausibly with real people.

Traditional top-down, rectangular-box storytelling still thrives. But today there is also a 3D, bidirectional palette of opportunities that changes how artists conceive and present digital image content. In our cover story (p. 40), you can read how traditional film-based communication merged with science and digital technology on the dome of the Gates Planetarium. It's one example.

Just as Doug Trumbull gave display technology a place to aim for and a reason to improve, modern content creators will fill in the blanks and shape the future of display technology. You'll get what you demand and what you can make compelling use of.