Peter Cochrane's Video Blog: Fractal coding

Hi, my name is Peter Cochrane and I'm here for silicon.com. About 15 years ago I came across a technology that looked really promising - it was called fractal coding. It held out the possibility of almost infinite compression and almost perfect recovery. Some 10 years ago, I saw the first practical demonstrations and they were impressive. The snag was they required a huge amount of processing power that we just didn't have. Today I can tell you that that technology looks more of a reality because of the processing power advances of about 1000-fold in the last decade. I'm going show you a couple of demonstrations to explain what I mean and then I'm going to point you at a website - The Ted Conference 2007 in California, where there is a really interesting demonstration by Microsoft that's really worth watching. In this first sequence, you’ll see a Mosque and some boats in a Turkish harbour clearly reasonably well defined but as we zoom in and get closer and closer to the dome on the Mosque the picture becomes fuzzy, very unclear and gradually we start to see the pixilation, the little squares that make up the picture, emerge until it is absolutely meaningless. What we'd like to do is zoom in and retain that fine detail. If we now take the case for text and we assume a complete book on a single side of A4 and zoom in down to a page, down to a paragraph, down to a sentence and try and get down to a word, ultimately it's just blurred. But if we apply fractal coding the raw data of every letter is preserved. If you're prepared to be really impressed go to YouTube and search 'Arcas – Blaise Arcas' or alternatively you can search the Ted 2007 website and sit back in wonder at the presentation that Blaise gives – it's really impressive. See you next time.