After more than sixty years, televisions are as familiar as old boots. Once typecast as the indispensable altarpiece of a well-appointed living room, TVs have infected every human environment. The average American household has more television sets than people.
Today, if you've got the wall space and the wallet heft, you can have a mural-sized, high-definition plasma decorating your house, with picture quality that in some respects trumps what the local cineplex offered you a dozen years ago.
So what's next for TV? What's coming down the pike? Please understand: I'm not speaking about content (which will undoubtedly continue its relentless pursuit of greater erudition and artistic merit). I'm talking about picture quality.
Well, television technology is not in Kansas anymore. Image displays are about to go where no displays have gone before. Nonetheless, I figure they'll hit the equivalent of a brick wall within a decade or two. There will be an end point to how good TV pictures can get.
The boob tube has hugely benefited from the rapid advance of digital electronics. Consequently, the strategy for hardware has changed. In the old days, sets had to be as simple as Elmer Fudd to keep them inexpensive. All the technical "smarts" were at the transmitter end. But dumb TVs are no longer inevitable, because sophisticated electronics are cheap.
The most obvious dividend of this technical shift is greater resolution - the amount of detail in the picture. The longtime standard for American TV was 525 lines from top to bottom of the image. As a practical matter, that was roughly equivalent to 350 thousand pixels - pretty crude, given that photos made with your iPhone boast five million pixels. But those 525 lines were adequate to addict a generation to TV, soften the brains of billions of people, and spawn a new vegetable variety: the couch potato.
Hi-def TV - which is likely what you're watching these days - has the equivalent of 1,080 vertical lines and roughly 1,920 pixels per line, as well as sufficient detail to force your favorite on-air personalities to buy pancake makeup at a warehouse outlet.
However, this five-fold boost in pixel count - as impressive as it is - was no more than an opening move. Engineers are now experimenting with 4,096-line TV systems, suggesting that with the next generation of sets you'll be able to count the grass blades on the Superbowl field, an obvious lifestyle improvement.
In addition, new methods of encoding color are underway that will move television far beyond the compromised system originally developed in 1950 - a system that could show you only about one-third of the color range your eye can actually see. Then there's vastly improved sound, 3-D, and a faster frame rate for smoothly reproducing quick moves, such as the Green Lantern barreling through the lower stratosphere.
OK, great. TVs are getting better. But is there really an end point to the technology race?
I think so. In 1993, I wrote a paper for the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers in which I calculated how good a TV system must be to simulate reality. In other words, what set of specs would result in a TV able to appear as a window, not a screen - a set that could reproduce the world in a way that was indistinguishable from seeing it in person.
This dream TV would be wide screen of course, and I reckoned it would measure about 36,000 by 28,000 pixels. There'd be 17 bits of encoding for each of the primary colors, three-dimensional capability, and a frame rate of at least 60 images per second. Extrapolating the improvement of digital electronics two decades ago, I figured you could build a lab version of this "ultimate television system" by 2020. Several TV engineers who saw this paper opined that it was more suitable for publication in magazines such as Analog or Weird Tales. (At least they read it.)
However, you might want to put this in your Dunhill and smoke it: NHK, the Japanese national television organization, is already experimenting with a setup they call Super Hi-Vision. Ten bit color depth, 60 frames per second and 7,680 by 4,320 pixel imagery. Not quite my ultimate, but it's not quite the year 2020 either.
So what happens when your home television set provides a visual experience indistinguishable from "being there"? Well, it might cause a lot of TV engineers to retire. But would a television set boasting image quality as good as the local multiplex signal the death of movie theaters?
I doubt it. Teenagers will always like a dark place to go on a Saturday night. And who doesn't enjoy a good $15 bag of popcorn? Besides, sitting on the couch counting those grass blades could get tedious.
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Perhaps we'll hit a pixel density that can simulate an image that looks perfectly real.. but then they'll get thinner, lighter, cheaper...
... then something will come along and make the whole technology obsolete.
At any rate, to suggest that technology that simulates images is going to stop progressing any time in the next millenia is silly.
And, of course, we have to ask ourselves whether it is meaningful to have more pixels on the display when the information content continues its monotonic decline. For me, the answer is no.
Fully agree. And it seems to be a global trend.
I wondered how long it would be before digital animation would be indistinguishable from live action.
The response I got was something like "never, way too much computing power required". Today, CGI in movies is not far away from that day. Actors, beware.
You can wake up to the sun rising over the ocean and your perspective is from the beach, even though you are in Manhattan. Cameras that monitor you and where you are looking, can adjust to create a 3d environment such that you feel wrapped inside the projection.
Also you get to wake up every day to Paris, or you can wake up and the Beach and then a second latter be watching the sun rise from the top of a mountain peak.
Or Have Virtual Wall half a world a way.
Sometimes the ability to travel at the speed of thought is as good as the real thing.
Also if we are talking about telepresence at some point we will be able to encode and transmit touch, as well as sound and visuals. We will be able to simulate reality with 100% fidelity. You won't be able to tell the difference between live and memorex.
If I peer further into the future this is where I see television:
1. Holographic television.
2. Holographic television in which you are part of the story.
3. Direct transmittal to the brain of an alternate reality that is indistinguishable from our present one. In this environment all your senses are at work and the feedback is real and tactile.
The author knows a thing or two, but to suggest that any tech will "Hit a wall" is silly - because everyone who's ever made that claim ends up looking the fool for it.
I've given the screen resolution issue some thought myself, and I've concluded that the pursuit of more pixels will soon be the same kind of thing. Videophiles will tell you how much better it looks, but they won't actually be able to tell.
Not at a normal viewing distance, anyway. Most people can't stand to be closer to a screen than its diagonal length -- i.e., you'll want to sit no closer than 52" from a 52" screen. Do the math. When viewed from one diagonal's distance, a pixel on a 1920 x 1080 screen subtends 0.026 degrees. That's already pretty close to the angular resolution of the human eye, which is one arc-minute, or 0.017 degrees. We need only to double the resolution of existing HDTV to get pixels that are too close for our eyes to separate.
I can see merits to all of the other changes you suggest: more bits per color, a larger color gamut, and frame rates of 60 Hz or even a little higher. But resolution is nearly played out.
The highest resolution region of the human eye's field of view is only about 20 degrees though, and so an adaptive display could work. Current flight simulators with helmet-mounted displays present a view indistinguishable from reality in the visor.
Also, I don't think that the diffraction limit of the pupil is an issue. I think that the limiting factor is actually the density of photoreceptor cells on the retina.
I'd be happy to read any links which offer new information.
JPEG wiped out shadows and highlights, but with all the infrastructure that has it, we might be stuck with it for another 20 years.
4000 x 3000 is a pretty good choice for a movie-screen resolution. With the screen filling a 60-degree field of view (i.e, you are sitting VERY close to the movie screen), two adjacent pixels at the center of the screen subtend 0.014 degrees, which is 0.86 arc-minutes. Of course, you would probably sit farther back, which works to your advantage where resolution is concerned.
The only reason to choose a higher resolution than this would be to create the perfect IMAX-type experience. In an IMAX theater, the screen may span as much as 120 degrees of your field of view. But this article is about "the ultimate TELEVISION," and so I don't think we're talking about IMAX. We're talking about that flat panel on your family room wall.
I spend a significant proportion of every year in the Far East, and every time I head back to Europe, it's like going back into the past. I'm sure you didn't mean any harm by it, but the idea that the West is, even now, let alone in the future, the place where new technology will occur is a bit out-dated.