New options and considerations for creating enhanced viewing experiences

The Day the Standards Died Once upon a time, life was simple. Electronic display meant television. OK, OK so even when life was simple there were two main standards NTSC (affectionately known as "Never The Same Color Twice" or better known as the U.S. standard) and PAL, the standard for much of Europe. With the entire user base and the whole broadcast infrastructure hanging on them, changing or improving the television standards was a far from trivial task.Attempts at doing so included such Herculean developments efforts as Sony's HDVS bid for the high definition television standard. Then along came the computer with its new user bases, self contained infrastructures and inherent capability to format its output to various standards. At first there seemed to be no correlation between the television formats and the endless and growing series of computer output standards. Only the display board, monitor and test equipment manufacturers needed to respond to the ever increasing variety of formats. But then it got worse! At the high end, workstations and engineering computers crept into higher and higher resolutions.At the low end, multimedia created an acceptance of grainy, steppy little "postage stamp movies" as acceptable imaging. Now we are in the situation where both ends keep creeping in both directions! On the low end, multimedia is moving toward full screen, full motion video, while the Internet continues to increase the use and acceptance of steppy little animated postage stamps. In the evolving middle, television sets are used to surf the net with Net TV, while computers are used as TV sets, and Japanese television manufacturers like Sony and NEC are jumping into the PC marker. Finally, on the high end, workstation and graphics systems have evolved texture mapped, photo realistic, extreme high resolution, real-time outputs with full motion video resolution images incorporated directly within the systems. Changing display formats has become as fluid as changing a setting on a drop down menu or even resizing a window.At what resolution? Who knows! You choose.At what standard? Who knows! We have even stopped naming them. I propose to you, dear readers, that we unanimously declare the idea of display standards as DEAD! Perhaps a less dramatic, positive and much more politically correct way of stating the above is to assert that "Today, display output formats are totally scalable:' This has a profound affect on the makers of all types of display devices they need to incorporate today's inherent media scalability into their hardware's technical capabilities. Consequendy, if there are no more standard technical formats to center on, perhaps we need to center on "experiential formats."