Turning a Bit Stream Into a Raging River
Digital Evolution has developed a novel solution for squeezing real-time interactivity out of low-bandwidth Internet connections.
Last week, the Brentwood-based company unveiled Media Conveyor, a technology 1 1/2 years in the making that employs a pair of tricks to “energize” traditional Web sites with easy-to-digest animation and video.
“We’ve divorced the visual content from the audio content, and we marry it back on the client side in perfect synchronization,” said Eric Pulier, Digital Evolution’s president.
To speed up the visual side, Media Conveyor creates an “organibase” that contains all of the elements used to animate a character, such as hands, legs and eyebrows.
Once the organibase is stored on the user’s PC, a Media Conveyor-equipped Web site need only send downstream the instructions for how to put the elements together. That requires far less bandwidth than all of the bits required to draw each frame of an animation from scratch, Pulier said.
To integrate sound with the picture, Digital Evolution developed a “predictive packeting” technique that intersperses packets of streaming audio with their corresponding video instructions. Such synchronization of the audio and video prevents the pictures from running ahead of the sound, or vice versa, Pulier said.
Digital Evolution will officially launch the RealNetworks-style Media Conveyor products--server software, authoring software and a player to reside on PCs--in about a month.
Pulier said Media Conveyor is already being used in part of Microsoft’s corporate intranet, and last week Digital Evolution announced that it will be used in Starbright World, the private computer network for hospital-bound children created by Steven Spielberg’s Starbright Foundation.
