Does this sound familiar? You wait long minutes for an image to load over the Internet, only to find it was not what you wanted. New software being developed could cut your waiting from minutes to seconds, without you spending a penny on new hardware.
The above images of President Clinton illustrate how the new method would work over a slow 2400 baud modem. After only 2 seconds, a recognizable image emerges. After 20 seconds the image is almost indistinguishable from the original. Compare this with the almost 3 minutes it would take to load the full resolution image.
This new transmission method is being developed by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and the Space Telescope Science Institute. Their approach relies on the compression and progressive transmission of images. The method allows a user to view an image as it arrives, rather than waiting for the whole thing. The user receives a useful image in a fraction of the time required for the entire image.
Check out other observations in the Observation of the Week Archive.