Many scientists and engineers create moving pictures in their research. These pictures range from the dazzling supercomputer animations produced by mathematicians and physicists to the video images of living cells shot by biologists through powerful microscopes. Until recently they have not had a means of publishing these moving pictures and could only distribute them by mailing their peers self-copied videocassettes. Today the increasing capacity of the Internet and rapidly evolving computer hardware and software is beginning to make possible the production and global distribution of digital audio and video. These developments allow scientists to publish research documents in the medium of television.
Computers are now commonly used for videoconferencing -- video cameras are frequently mounted on the tops of computer screens for precisely this purpose. Soon cameras will be as standard a computer accessory as microphones and speakers are now. Manufacturers of computers and peripherals offer a wide range of video support hardware and software. Among the more popular and least expensive are IBM's Action Media II card and Apple's Quicktime. These were designed for the multimedia market and have yet to be fully exploited for scientific communication -- though their potential is enormous. Two products that may play a pivotal role in this are multimedia authoring tools from Macromedia, Authorware Professional and Director. These offer the ability to create documents (multimedia programs) that can be viewed on both Macintosh and Windows platforms with video playback software supplied with the program itself -- thus alleviating the need for the viewer to obtain additional hardware or software. At the higher end are the Silicon Graphics Indigo video card and the Xvideo card made by Parallax for use on Sun work-stations. Sun also sells a multimedia authoring tool.
Using products like those mentioned above, an author can digitize and compress a 30 minute video presentation into 300 megabytes of data. This will be good quality video, full color and nearly full motion with screen resolution about equal to NTSC, the American broadcast standard. This program can be downloaded across a T3 (i.e. 45 Megabit/sec) link to a distant viewer's computer in 53 seconds. When the NSFNet is upgraded to OC3 (i.e. 155 Megabits/sec) during the next two years the required download time will drop to 15 seconds. When the US "data superhighway" with a 1 Gigabit/second data rate is operational -- some say in 4 years or less -- the download time for a 30 minute video program will be only 2.4 seconds. At that point virtually unlimited use of the Internet for the exchange of video documents and live video multi-casting will be possible. One can anticipate that a number of new publication models will arise. Some may be patterned after print journals, offering selected viewer submissions, others will be familiar television formats like talk shows, news reports and live viewer "call-ins". Many of these video publications will be organized by discipline, much as the current bulletin boards are, some will be interdisciplinary, like the journals Science and Nature.
We are entering the age of video email, video computer bulletin boards and ultimately video journals with the same degree of editorial quality control that now exists in print. The average scientist is now able to put a television reception, production and distribution center on his desk for under $10,000. This has turned the computer into the television equivalent of the ham radio set. Television will no longer be only a mass audience medium, instead, in a very short time, it will be the most common and the preferred form of scientific communication.
Addendum: Below is a chart showing the download time for a 30 minute video program compressed into 300 megabytes of data and transmitted across lines of various bandwidths
14.4kb/s 128kb/s 1.5Mb/s 45Mb/s 155Mb/s 620Mb/s 1Gb/s Dial-up ISDN T1 T3 OC3(2yrs) OC12(4yrs?) DataSuperHway(4yrs?) 46hrs 5.2hrs 27min 53sec 15sec 4sec 2.4sec
Mr. Gary Welz, setn@acmvm.bitnet, President
Science and Engineering Television Network, Inc.
c/o Association for Computing Machinery
1515 Broadway 17th floor
New York, NY 10036
Phone (212) 626-0555
Return to the GLOSAS News Contents for this issue.
URL: http://library.fortlewis.edu/~instruct/glosas/scieng33.htm
July 1993
GLOSAS NEWS was orinally posted to the WWW at URL: http://library.fortlewis.edu/~instruct/glosas/cont.htm by Tina Evans Greenwood, Library Instruction Coordinator, Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado 81301, e-mail: greenwood_t@fortlewis.edu, and last updated May 7, 1999. By her permission the whole Website has been archived here at the University of Tennessee server directory of GLOSAS Chair Dr. Takeshi Utsumi from July 10, 2000 by Steve McCarty in Japan.