Almost all the major computer manufacturers are thoroughly starstruck now, and IBM Corp was back in Hollywood yesterday to announce an alliance with Total Multimedia Inc under which the two will jointly develop digital film technology designed to enable producers to create programmes or films of undefined screen resolutions. The technique is based on the famous fractal technology exploited by Iterated Systems Inc, Norcross, Georgia, and enables programming to be viewed in any screen size or image detail and for the images to be stored in highly compressed form. Users can zoom in on the images as if they were created with physical film technology and they can played back on computer screens, televisions and, eventually, at full film resolution using video projectors. The partners reckon that hours of material can fit on a single compact disk compared with the present limit of two and a quarter hours set by Nimbus Ltd. The technology enables still image scenes and motion video sequences to be digitally converted to resolution-independent imagery. The technology is claimed to make possible much more image detail and colour fidelity than traditional, blocky pixelated forms of digital image compression. The system to perform these miracles consists of Iterated Systems’ fractal technology running on an IBM Power Visualization System using SoftVideo authoring tools from Thousand Oaks, California-based Total Multimedia. Fractals were first discovered by IBM researcher Benoit Mandelbrot in 1975 as a new mathematical way of examining, describing and reproducing irregular shapes, IBM notes, adding that fractal geometry helps delineate and formulate an order in events and phenomena, such as the shapes of coastlines or the path of a lightning bolt – phenomena that are usually thought to be patterns and shapes without order: fractal mathematics enables sequences of numbers to reproduce complex shapes mathematically by drawing on their inherent self-similarity to their neighbouring parts. Iterated’s fractal technology is claimed to enable programming to be produced digitally without loss of image detail during the process, and is said to be the best means found so far for producing a single digital image file that can be played back with best fidelity possible on a variety of systems.
