Vector Vengeance: British Claim They Can Kill the Pixel Within Five Years 221
MrSeb writes "The humble pixel — the 2D picture element that has formed the foundation of just about every kind of digital media for the last 50 years — may soon meet its maker. Believe it or not, if a team of British are to be believed, the pixel, within five short years, will be replaced with vectors. If you know about computer graphics, or if you've ever edited or drawn an image on your computer, you know that there are two primary ways of storing image data: As a bitmap, or as vectors. A bitmap is quite simply a giant grid of pixels, with the arrangement and color of the pixels dictating what the image looks like. Vectors are an entirely different beast: In vector graphics, the image is described as a series of mathematical equations. To draw a bitmap shape you just color in a block of pixels; with vector graphics, you would describe the shape in terms of height, width, radius, and so on. At the moment, bitmaps are used almost exclusively in the realm of digital media — but that isn't to say they don't have their flaws. As display (and camera and cinema) resolution increases, so does the number of pixels. The obvious problem with this is that larger bitmaps are computationally more expensive to process, resulting in a slower (or more expensive) workflow. Pixel bitmaps don't scale very gracefully; reduction is okay, but enlargement is a no-no. There is always the issue of a master format, too: With pixel bitmaps, conversions from one format to another, or changing frame rates, is messy, lossy business. Which finally leads us back to the innovation at hand: Philip Willis and John Patterson of the University of Bath in England have devised a video codec that replaces pixel bitmaps with vectors (PDF)."
But (Score:5, Funny)
But, if there are no pixels, how will I detect photoshops? I've seen quite a few in my day...
get ready for some Tempest 2017 (Score:5, Funny)
get ready for some Tempest 2017
Why hate on pixels? (Score:4, Funny)
Just to spite them, i am going to republish their PDF using a 1024x14576 .bmp file.
There is a reflection on that hubcap... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Terrible summary (Score:5, Funny)
They're not "getting rid of pixels," since you'll still have pixels on your monitor and your graphics card will still buffer what it's drawing to the screen.
The paper sounds interesting enough, but the summary has essentially nothing to do with it.
No no, they also specify a hardware appliance of several algorithmically aware lasers that will dance around in a box to the exact specification of the vector design, and it would generate a new frame as fast as the light could get from one end to the other. It was on page p[k_, n_] := ((k - 2) n (n + 1))/2 - (k - 3) n;
Re:But (Score:2, Funny)
You can tell from the polynomials.
Re:Terrible summary (Score:4, Funny)
The fault lies with the university's PR department this time.
Obligatory PHD Comics strip: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174 [phdcomics.com]
My dad used to say... (Score:4, Funny)