I have duel US/Aus citizenship too, and live mostly in Australia.
However I don't earn much of my living here. I like to live in the tropics, and wages suck. If you were prepared to live down in
Sydney you could probably find wages around 1/2 the US equivalent. Up here it's more like 1/10.
So instead I do contract work for US clients, and make frequent visits there. Viva la Internet! Viva la QANTAS.
It turns out the lossless compression of audio
has a practical limit of about 3:1 across
a typical sample of 44100Hz 16-bit 2-channel
music sources using the best currently known
methods.
The research effort on lossless audio compression has really
lost a lot of momentum with the arrival
of good-quality psycho-acoustic techniques
offering 12:1 compression.
Lossless compression isn't impossible, it just
isn't a big enough win.
The article from New Scientist doesn't do a good job of highlighting the real innovation here. Here's my take...
People have been doing tele-immersion for a long time using virtual worlds and avatars. Scene geometry is normally represented in VRML or
some other geometric modelling system. Generating stereo image-pairs from a
geometric model at arbitrary points-of-view is easy (or at least well understood).
What these guys are doing is scanning the geometry
of a real scene in real-time and transmitting something functionally equivalent to a polygon list plus texture maps
to allow the remote user to construct an
image from any point of view.
As far as I can tell, that's the real innovation.
I see the article defines tele-immersion to exclude synthetic worlds. In my experience
the term encompasses any immersive experience that
brings together multiple remote participants in
a shared virtual space. I don't care who coined
the term, it now has a life of its own.
Slashdot Mirror
However I don't earn much of my living here. I like to live in the tropics, and wages suck. If you were prepared to live down in Sydney you could probably find wages around 1/2 the US equivalent. Up here it's more like 1/10.
So instead I do contract work for US clients, and make frequent visits there. Viva la Internet! Viva la QANTAS.
It turns out the lossless compression of audio has a practical limit of about 3:1 across a typical sample of 44100Hz 16-bit 2-channel music sources using the best currently known methods. The research effort on lossless audio compression has really lost a lot of momentum with the arrival of good-quality psycho-acoustic techniques offering 12:1 compression. Lossless compression isn't impossible, it just isn't a big enough win.
People have been doing tele-immersion for a long time using virtual worlds and avatars. Scene geometry is normally represented in VRML or some other geometric modelling system. Generating stereo image-pairs from a geometric model at arbitrary points-of-view is easy (or at least well understood).
What these guys are doing is scanning the geometry of a real scene in real-time and transmitting something functionally equivalent to a polygon list plus texture maps to allow the remote user to construct an image from any point of view. As far as I can tell, that's the real innovation.
I see the article defines tele-immersion to exclude synthetic worlds. In my experience the term encompasses any immersive experience that brings together multiple remote participants in a shared virtual space. I don't care who coined the term, it now has a life of its own.