HD of the future offers 16 times as many pixels.
I have seen the future, and it is freaking huge!
A new standard has emerged for Ultra High Definition Television, and it is completely useless for today’s living rooms or movie theaters. At approximately 16x the resolution of high definition, and approximately 4x the resolution of the RED Epic, it seems like this new standard is a solution in search of a problem.
However, once you have that many pixels to play with, you can start to think about new and interesting ways to utilize video.
Take this scenario: Imagine that you’re a business person on an extended stay away from your family. Today, you might utilize FaceTime or Skype to have a video chat. Now imagine that back home you had a TV the size of your entire living room wall, and the resolution was so high that you could literally press your nose to the screen, and the image would look like a window – no pixels visible at all. Instead of turing on the computer and talking to a little box on a little screen on a little computer, you could appear as though you were actually in the room with your family – separated by a window rather than by thousands of miles. You could sit down and have dinner together, read stories together, watch TV together – you could do everything except give the little ones a hug goodnight.
While many people are going to cheer (or criticize) this new standard based on existing entertainment technology, I think Ultra High Definition will drive all sorts of creative possibilities that we haven’t even begun to imagine.