International Digital Cinema Microscopy Project Wins CENIC’s 2012 Innovations in Networking Award for Experimental/Developm...
March 15 2012 - 12:00PM
Business Wire
An international collaboration to stream live,
ultra-high-definition, 60 frame per second microscopic video at the
Tokyo International Film Festival has been honored by the
Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC)
as recipient of the 2012 Innovations in Networking Awards for
Experimental/Developmental Applications.
Live digital cinema streaming and the sharing of high-resolution
scientific imaging have emerged as “killer apps” for advanced
networks, and during the Tokyo International Film Festival's
CineGrid session in October of 2011, they were combined with
microscopy at 4k/60P for the first time, as 4k microscopic images
of living microorganisms at 60 frames per second were captured and
streamed live from the University of Southern California (USC)’s
School of Cinematic Arts across the Pacific Ocean to an audience in
Tokyo. Network connectivity provided by USC, CENIC, AboveNet,
CineGrid, CISCO Cwave, Pacific Wave and Japan's JGN-X formed the 10
Gigabit trans-Pacific path that enabled this event.
USC Cinematic Arts' Richard Weinberg, project leader, and
international digital media research consortium CineGrid had
previously demonstrated simultaneous 4k microscopic image capture
and live HD streaming from USC to UCSD in San Diego and to the
SIGGRAPH Asia conference in Yokohama, Japan in 2009. With the
addition of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) Network Innovation
Laboratory members and JPEG2000 codec technology to the project,
the demonstration in October 2011 brought a dramatic increase in
the resolution of the live image transmission, increasing the
resolution from HD to 4k/60fps, achieving a fourfold increase in
number of pixels and a doubling of the frame rate. Members of the
audience in Tokyo witnessed the benefit of seeing live aquatic
microorganisms, invisible to the naked eye, at the highest
resolution and frame rates yet achieved at that distance, with less
than a second's delay from Los Angeles.
Four Innovations on Networking Awards are given annually by
CENIC to highlight exemplary innovations that leverage ultra
high-bandwidth networking, particularly where those innovations
have the potential to revolutionize the ways in which instruction
and research are conducted, or where they further the deployment of
broadband in underserved areas.
About CENIC • www.cenic.org
California’s education and research communities leverage their
networking resources under CENIC, the Corporation for Education
Network Initiatives in California, in order to obtain
cost-effective, high-bandwidth networking to support their missions
and answer the needs of their faculty, staff, and students. CENIC
designs, implements, and operates CalREN, the California Research
and Education Network, a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet
network specially designed to meet the unique requirements of these
communities, and to which the vast majority of the state’s K-20
educational institutions are connected. In order to facilitate
collaboration in education and research, CENIC also provides
connectivity to non-California institutions and industry research
organizations with which CENIC’s Associate researchers and
educators are engaged.