Research and development of the technologies have been in full activity in North America, Europe and Asia aiming at practical implementation of the expanded hierarchy of LSDI systems from capture to large screen presentation. Some of the technologies have already been realized. Those technologies are summarized in Table 14.
TABLE 14
Available technologies for the expanded hierarchy of LSDI systems
Area of technology
Relevant sections in the Report on LSDI technology
The 2005 World Exposition, Aichi, Japan is being held from 25 March to 25 September. Its objective is to provide the place for the world’s people to gather and think on behalf of the life and future of all the Earth. NHK, a public broadcaster of Japan, is taking part in the EXPO and exhibiting a next-generation audio-visual system “Super Hi-Vision”, an extremely high-resolution video system with 8k 4k pixels, at Global House, the symbol pavilion.
2 Theatre
A schematic configuration of the system is shown in Fig. 45. It consists of hard disk recorders for extremely high-resolution video, a switcher, a projector, a 600-inch (13 m 7 m) screen, a hard disk recorder for 22.2 multichannel audio, a mixer, audio amplifiers and 77 loudspeakers. These components are controlled by operators through a sequence controller. The arrangement of the loudspeakers and the screen are shown Figs 46 and 47. The viewing angle ranges from 100° at the front row to 60° at the last row of the theatre.
An OB van equipped with the above-mentioned hard disk recorder and an extremely high-resolution camera was built. Shooting was conducted around Japan for seven months since July 2004 (see Fig. 48). Computer-based equipment and technologies were applied for postproduction and CG generation. Through the productions of demo materials, various recordings of 22.2 multichannel sound were carried out. A recording of music was done in a large recording studio using about 40 microphones. Many production recordings in various fields were also held using about ten microphones.
4 Instant capture and replay
In addition to the seven-minute programme, an instant capture and replay is also featured at the show. Four hundred people from the audience are shot in their waiting lines in front of the theatre and the video is replayed on the screen in their turn. Extremely high-resolution images make it possible for everyone to find his or her face on the screen. This demonstrates its electronic feature.
5 Conclusions
The exhibition of an extremely high-resolution audio-visual system comprising 8k 4k-pixel video and 22.2 multichannel audio at the World Expo 2005, is an example of expanded hierarchy of LSDI systems. World expositions are called the showcases of the future. Television appeared firstly at the New York Expo in 1939, and HDTV was exhibited on a large-scale at the Tsukuba Expo in 1985. The exhibition of “Super Hi-Vision” this time is also a debut for just-born technology, as the past shows. Although there were a lot of technical challenges to be solved, it is great progress that the actually working system is exhibited to the general public for half a year. It is expected that quite a few people will recognize its potential and R&D will be further accelerated.