SAN DIEGO, July 12, 2006 – When the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) opened its new 200-seat auditorium it needed a projector capable of delivering images at resolutions that mirrored reality as closely as possible. The research organization found that in the Sony SXRD™ 4K large-venue projector, the 10,000 lumen model SRX-R110.

“We needed a projector with enough brightness to illuminate a 20-by-30-foot movie-theater-style screen,” said Professor Larry Smarr, founding director of Calit2.   “We also needed the color and contrast to be the best available so that each person in the auditorium – whether near to the screen or far – could see with the same degree of clarity.” 

Calit2 is a research institution at the University of California, San Diego and the University of California-Irvine.  The institution was among the first to receive Sony’s 4K SXRD projector and utilize the technology in its auditorium. 

Calit2 can now generate theater-size images in 4K resolution, a reference to the projector’s 4096 x 2160 pixel matrix, or approximately 8.8 million pixels, enabling it to deliver four times the resolution of current high-definition home theater systems.

In addition, the Sony projector is able to receive 4K images from a wide variety of sources, including digital still cameras, scanned film, live imagery and computers.  This enables applications such as “telepresence” conferencing, in which participants feel more connected to members of teleconferences due to the high resolution of the images. 

“The human eye has a finite resolution at which it can’t tell the difference between a projected image and reality,” said Smarr.  “The 4K resolution generated by the Sony projector is definitely on the ‘other side of the rainbow.’  Calit2 always has the best visualization products, but this projector has really knocked me out.”

According to the facility, Calit2 can create visual displays with the SXRD projector at resolutions that audiences find visually indistinguishable from reality, no matter where they are sitting in the auditorium. In addition, the projector has consistently performed without failure over several months of constant use, which Smarr cites as extremely unusual for a developing technology. 

 “I am very impressed with how versatile the projector is in handling a wide variety of source imagery,” said Smarr.  “I believe that 4K can become a general tool for showing multi-megapixel images in wider applications beyond cinema, such as science, engineering and medicine.” 

In fact, according to Smarr, the technology has worked so well that Calit2 now has plans to create a virtual reality environment in 8K projection, which would include two of the Sony 4K projectors per wall.  There are also plans to incorporate the projector into the facility’s OptIPuter project.  The OptIPuter, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, creates “super-networks” by coupling computer resources over dedicated parallel optical Internet Protocol (IP) networks.

“The OptIPuter generates 200 times the bandwidth of currently available networks,” said Smarr.  “This allows us to open up the world of visualization to the 4K resolution available from the Sony projector, paving the way for applications such as digital cinema and interactive telepresence.”