Tuesday Nov. 06, 2007
The World Wide Web Gets Better Vision
William Gibson in his early trilogy, “Shockwave Rider,” “Count Zero,” and “Mona Lisa Overdrive,” described a network that today’s world wide web is slowly beginning to resemble.” YouTube can be likened to the eyes of this universal www organism—a terrorist explosion in the middle east, a bridge collapse in the U.S. Midwest, a tsunami in Banda Aceh, an elderly woman in a crosswalk getting back at an impatient driver by detonating his air bag after he honks at her, a high-chair bound infant with an infectious laugh, all moments played over and over again hundreds and thousands of time continuously.
Just as a biological being grows over time, the artificial organism—the construct of copper wires, fiber optic cable, and silicon chips and millions of lines of code—evolves and its eyesight improves. The grainy flickering frames of the London subway bombing or the lone skier caught perfectly slaloming down the near vertical face of a mountain will soon give way to broadcast quality video made available standard on any video-enabled mobile phone.
That’s the contention of my colleague Marco Jacobs, a solutions architect based in The Netherlands. He tells me everyone claims to have H.264 Standard Definition-ready phones, however, none have yet debuted. The elements necessary for this to occur are low-cost camera modules and H.264 video encoders able to produce standard definition quality video; all now becoming widely available.
Camera modules small enough to fit into the slimmest MotoRazrTM phone are becoming commonplace. For example, Omnivision’s OV7680 VGA resolution camera announced at the beginning of August promises a camera module in a mere 4.5 mm by 4.5 mm by 2 mm.
And there are several IP blocks on the market promising standard definition video encode. The great problem confronting designers building these next generation video phones—the eyes of the www organism—is developing solutions that encompass the different encoding schemes favored by different geographies.
Will Strauss who runs Forward Concepts tells me that MPEG 4 is the preferred choice among European phone makers while the Japanese have a fondness for H.264, which makes more sense to me since you get high resolution with a lower bit rate. And then there is the uncertain Chinese market which may have yet another standard.
Whichever standard prevails and whoever’s IP and camera module ends up in the next next-generation phone, one thing is certain, the quality of video content is going to get better. And the collective visual record in the www organism will be of higher quality…for better or worse.
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About the Author
Yoda, AKA Jonah McLeod, is an ex-editor turned marketing director at ARC International, after a stint in a similar role at Denali Software. Today, his major responsibility is a conference on configurable SoC design called ConfigCon, where he assembles 30-minute technology presentations, which were given to an annual audience last year of over 1000 designers throughout the world. During his career as an editor he ran Silicon Strategies and Integrated System Design magazine, purchased by CMP in 2000. Previously, he was a editor-in-chief with Electronics (no longer being published) and technology editor with Electronic Design - both owned by Penton Media. He won the Jesse H. Neal award in 1990 for his editorials in Electronics. Before his career in publishing, he was a PR account executive at Regis McKenna Advertising & Public Relations, where he launched the Apple II computer and the Intel 8086progenitor to the processor found in most computers worldwide today. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from University of Texas, Arlington.
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