Compression specialist Iterated Systems Inc has unveiled its fractal video viewer, claiming software that can show video clips across an Internet connection using a standard modem. Fractal techniques are claimed to produce far more tightly compressed files than other methods – ratios of 150:1 are not unusual – beating Cinepak compression by between 10 and 30 times. Because they are built from mathematical patterns, fractal images can also be shrunk or zoomed without losing the degree of quality or clarity common with other formats. This enables Web pages to hold a single image that doubles as a thumbnail and the full-sized picture. CoolFusion, Iterated’s fractal video software, is claimed to be capable of providing full motion video (up to 25 frames per second) across a standard 14.4Kbps modem – if the conditions are clear. Even 15 frames per second will be a considerable boost for Internet surfers that are accustomed to having their lines jammed with ‘slideshow’ video providing little more than a new frame every second. CoolFusion is a fractal plug-in for Netscape Communications Corp’s Navigator 2.0. Currently it will play AVI video files encoded with Microsoft Corp’s Video For Windows, but the company said its own fractal encoder will be available publicly before the end of June. Iterated is seeking beta testers and intends to give away the fractal decoders free of charge, hoping to spread the fractal image, currently suffering some obscurity, far across the Web. The company will make its money on the encoders, for which Bob Davis, Iterated’s marketing vice-president, expects to sell licenses for upwards of $1,500 each. The Atlanta, Georgia company owns the fractal transformation patent devised by founder Michael Barnsley. In studying the mathematical properties of Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractal patterns, Barnsley discovered a way of reversing the mathematics-to-pattern coding and managed to generate the ‘fractal transform’ used in the firm’s visual encoding systems.
Kept quiet
CoolFusion is available at www.iterated.com, as is the Fractal Imager, a $40 shareware compression tool that enables Web site developers to include fractal images in their pages. Fractal Imager will be implemented on Macintosh and 16-bit Windows systems by the end of this month. Davis said that the company had kept quiet for the past six months as it built its management team, which is now complete. He expects demand for the software to be overwhelming and doesn’t begrudge competitors. We will always be big because we were first in there, he said. Barnsley claims that the fractal algorithm is only 20% understood. Fractal compression is still too slow to perform real-time compression – taking up to an hour to compress one minute of fractal video – but Iterated is hopeful that as the algorithm becomes better known, so these timings will soon come down.
