Immersive video

An immersive video is basically a video recording of a real world scene, where the view in every direction is recorded at the same time. During playback the viewer has control of the viewing direction. Generally the only area that can't be viewed is the view toward the camera support. The material is recorded as data which when played back through a software player allows the user control of the viewing direction and playback speed. The player control is typically via a mouse or other sensing device and the playback view is typically 4:3 window on a computer display or projection screen or other presentation device such as a head mounted display.

A recent example, as of 2011, of immersive video is provided by the Kogeto Dot panoramic video capture device and associated online community for smartphones, for the iPhone 4, iPhone 4S and for the Galaxy Nexus with the Kogeto Dot 360-degree panoramic video accessory.

Sometimes the phrase "immersive video" is used to describe full-size teleconferencing capabilities, such as Cisco's Telepresence product.

Microsoft Video 1

Microsoft Video 1 or MS-CRAM is an early lossy video compression and decompression algorithm (codec) that was released with version 1.0 of Microsoft's Video for Windows in November 1992. It is based on MotiVE, a vector quantization codec which Microsoft licensed from Media Vision. In 1993, Media Vision marketed the Pro Movie Spectrum, an ISA board that captured video in both raw and MSV1 formats (the MSV1 processing was done in hardware on the board).

Compression algorithm

Microsoft Video 1 operates either in a 8-bit palettized color space or in a 15-bit RGB color space. Each frame is split into 4×4 pixel blocks. Each 4×4 pixel block can be coded in one of three modes: skip, 2-color or 8-color. In skip mode, the content from the previous frame is copied to the current frame in a conditional replenishment fashion. In 2-color mode, two colors per 4×4 block are transmitted, and 1 bit per pixel is used to select between the two colors. In 8-color mode, the same scheme applies with 2 colors per 2×2 block. This can be interpreted as a 2-color palette which is locally adapted on either a 4×4 block basis or a 2×2 block basis. Interpreted as vector quantization, vectors with components red, green, and blue are quantized using a forward adaptive codebook with two entries.

USA (disambiguation)

USA or U.S.A. usually refers to the United States of America, a country in North America.

USA or U.S.A. may also refer to:

Places

Business

Universities

Other uses

American Revolution

The American Revolution was a political upheaval that took place between 1765 and 1783 during which colonists in the Thirteen American Colonies rejected the British monarchy and aristocracy, overthrew the authority of Great Britain, and founded the United States of America.

Starting in 1765, members of American colonial society rejected the authority of the British Parliament to tax them without colonial representatives in the government. During the following decade, protests by colonists—known as Patriots—continued to escalate, as in the Boston Tea Party in 1773 during which patriots destroyed a consignment of taxed tea from the Parliament-controlled and favored East India Company. The British responded by imposing punitive laws—the Coercive Acts—on Massachusetts in 1774, following which Patriots in the other colonies rallied behind Massachusetts. In late 1774 the Patriots set up their own alternative government to better coordinate their resistance efforts against Great Britain, while other colonists, known as Loyalists, preferred to remain aligned to the British Crown.

USA-229

USA-229, known before launch as NRO Launch 34 (NROL-34), is a pair of American signals intelligence satellites which were launched in 2011. They are operated by the United States National Reconnaissance Office.

Both satellites were deployed by a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 411 carrier rocket, which launched from Space Launch Complex 3E at the Vandenberg Air Force Base. The launch occurred at 04:24 UTC on 15 April 2011. The rocket placed the satellites into a low Earth orbit. By 04:29 UTC, official updates on the status of the spacecraft had been discontinued.

Whilst details of the satellites and their missions are officially classified, amateur observers have identified that the Atlas V deployed two satellites, one of which has officially been catalogued as debris. The two spacecraft have been identified as being a pair of third or fourth generation Naval Ocean Surveillance System satellites. Amateur observations have located the spacecraft in an orbit with a perigee of 1,025 kilometres (637 mi) and an apogee of 1,207 kilometres (750 mi), inclined at 64.4 degrees to the plane of the equator. Current generation NOSS satellites are always launched and operated in pairs, and are used to locate and track ships from the radio transmissions that they emit.

Showcase

Showcase or Vitrine may refer to:

Television

Film and theater

Computing

Music

Other

Showcase (Canadian TV channel)

Showcase is a Canadian English language Category A specialty channel owned by Shaw Media. The channel deals primarily in scripted television series and films and was well-known in its early years for featuring unconventional and often risqué programming.

History

Licensed in 1994, Showcase was a venture between Alliance Communications (prior to its merger with Atlantis), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and a number of smaller independent Canadian producers, and was intended to be a showcase for "the best of independently-produced movies, drama, comedy and mini-series from Canada and around the world", with limited content from the United States. It launched at midnight on January 1, 1995.

When the network launched, it garnered some negative publicity due to a disclaimer that it would broadcast prior to reruns of older series. The disclaimer, which advised viewers to remember that "attitudes were not always the same as they are now" was applied to relatively recent programs such as Seeing Things. Following media scorn and accusations of political correctness and being condescending to viewers, Showcase abandoned this form of disclaimer.