lauren (01/16/83)
Greetings all. I'm pleased to be able to announce that, fairly shortly,
network site "vortex" will be offering an (exciting?) new "service" to
the network community: the Vortex Video System (VVS). Yes friends, it's
all free, and it should be worth every penny!
Now, you might ask, what the hell *is* the VVS? Briefly, vortex now has
the use of a medium-resolution video frame buffer ("frame grabber"), capable
of digitizing single video frames from both "live" video sources (such
as a local camera) or from broadcast/taped video sources. The hardware
involved has a resolution of 256 X 256 4-bit pixels, which is lightyears
away from the state of the art, but still capable of amazingly good
monochrome images. Stationary "live" images can also be digitized in
full color through RGB separation filters, though my hardware does not
have the capability of displaying such images directly.
Within the limits of available scratch disk space, I plan to make an
ever-changing collection of digitized pix available for retrieval
from vortex via UUCP. Given my rather, uh, esoteric tastes in video
and related areas, I would expect the stored pix to eventually cover a
rather broad cross-section of topics and sources. I will also consider
"special requests" for pix (within reasonable limits) and might even
be willing to digitize individual photos by special arrangement.
Please note that special requests will have to be on a "as time is available"
basis, since vortex has *very* limited resources, and by all rights I should
be spending my time doing just about *anything* other than playing with
this stuff. However, I very much appreciate Usenet, and I'd like to let
those of you who are interested share the fun.
Some of the technical details have yet to be worked out. Eventually, I'll
probably be compressing images to save on disk space, but for now they'll
be in a pretty straightforward format. I'll normally be digitizing with
a 4:3 aspect ratio, though I can do 1:1 if really necessary. Since
uuencoded images would be fairly large, I generally plan to (at least
initially) only store images in binary form, which pretty much requires
that any interested sites set up a direct UUCP link with vortex -- which
means that you'll have to call me (vortex generally does not make outgoing
calls unless absolutely necessary). Regular polling, of course, would not be
necessary, unless more than image retrievals is planned.
Almost any graphics equipment capable of displaying a 256 X 256 X 4-bit
grayscale image (preferably 4:3) should be able to display images
from the VVS. For those sites without such equipment, I plan to distribute
a simple little program to convert VVS pix into the typical large
lineprinter-generated "posters" with which we are all familiar.
All of this is predicated upon there being sufficient interest in the
network community for me to bother setting up all this. If you have
such interest, please drop me a line -- and please let me know what
sort of display equipment (if any), with what sort of operational
parameters, you would use for displaying images. If you don't have
display equipment, but are interested in lineprinter-generated images,
please let me know as well. If *you* have some interesting images
you'd care to share with vortex, I'd also like to hear from you!
I know. The whole thing is bizarre. But we might as well give it a try.
After all, life is short, and what's wrong with the bizarre, anyway?
--Lauren--
ucbvax!lbl-csam!vortex!lauren
(or) harpo!vortex!lauren
(or) decvax!vortex!lauren
(or) randvax!vortex!lauren