tech talk: vector video and the death of pixels

On the left, you can see the supposed vector paths.

Tech Talk Tuesday! I'm not sure if I'm going to turn this into a weekly column or not, but either way, let me share a bit of tech talk for the filmmakers/videoheads amongst you that I stumbled onto this morning because the concept blew my mind.

A team at the University of Bath is claiming that they've invented a vectored video codec and effectively killed pixels and resolution as we know them. In fact, they claim pixels will be gone within five years. (You can find further explanation and a sample video here.)

Vectors are a series of points and paths that turn everything into a mathematical whatnot. Therefore, you can make the same image as tiny or enormous as you'd like and it will always look exactly the same. The end of resolution as we know it. HD, 720, 1080, 2K, 4K... all out the window. And now you can go as big as you want without increasing the file size. Encode a film one time and that's it.

Overall, I'd say this is good news if it truly works. On the other hand, it scares me to death. Does this basically change every single thing we do at the root level? Do we toss every piece of video gear and software we're currently working on and start from scratch? Can this really be legit? Getting a photo-real image out of vectors is a little hard for me to believe, let alone 24-60 images per second. I guess time will tell.

ThinkGeek.com if you have to have it.
And for anyone who is incredibly bored by all this, did you know you can actually buy a tauntaun sleeping bag?! That's the other thing I learned today. If there was any debate over the greatest sleeping bag of all time, now we can put it to rest. Mrrawrharharhar. But, seriously, that's incredible.