 So, today I'm going to talk about CineGrid, which is a project that I've been involved with for about, well, almost 10 years now. And CineGrid is a virtual research organization spread out all over the world. Today, I'll be giving you some background on RIANCE, which is where I work now, and they're the Research and Education Advanced Network of New Zealand. We'll talk a little bit about CineGrid. I'll give you a survey of some of the projects, maybe initiate a discussion about why here, why now. And I'd like to leave you with a call to action, because it's really about community. And I am just one person, as passionate as I may be, I can't do these things alone. So, first of all, maybe a little bit more about me. I think of myself as an academic. I spent nearly 20 years at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. And the Naval Postgraduate School is a federally funded research university, whose students are mostly military officers from the U.S. and from our allies around the world. So you would see Kiwis there, you would see Aussies, people from the U.K., Turkey, Greece, Germany, maybe even a few from France. And there, I was a founding member of the Moves Institute, modeling virtual environments and simulations. And back in the 90s, that was a really cool thing. And so I've always been motivated by what is difficult to do on a network. And about 10 years ago, I turned my gaze from 3D virtual environments, because second life seemed to be solving that problem, onto something that is infinitely scalable called digital video. It will eat your network alive. So Cinegrid is inspired by the convergence of artists and engineers working together. Artists need technology to express their vision, well, in this space anyway. And engineers need artists to show them the unimagined to inspire them onward. And those are words by Mr. Lauren Hare. He's a co-founder of Cinegrid, uttered 10 years ago and still true today. Rianne's, where I work now as the science and education outreach manager, is the National Research and Education Network of New Zealand. We provide network services to all the universities, many of the polytechnics, crown research, and other institutions in the public space and in the innovation space. We are a growing network and undergone a lot of changes in the last four years, such that we are now on equal footing with some of the best networks in the world. And for a country the size of New Zealand, both geographically and demographically, that is a pretty astounding achievement. So we connect, Rianne's connects New Zealand to the world. We are among about 140 other national research and education networks. And through very high-speed connections from here to Sydney and here to Los Angeles, we connect New Zealand to the rest of the world. So you may not see that, those lines on here, hopefully it will be showing up in the PowerPoint that I can provide afterwards, but you see that it's the world and you'll take my word for it that we connect you to it. So here are some facts and figures, 99.998% network availability. That means we hardly ever go away. We are a persistent network and unlike your home network that might fluctuate with your neighbors watching of cat videos, we don't. We are engineered for capacity. Last year in 2014, we had a 46% overall traffic growth. That meant that we were carrying almost half as much network traffic again as the year before. And 94% of our members, those people at the universities and the research institutes and the polytechnics say that Rianne's is essential or very important to their work. Oh, and just another note, I'm going to be talking about video today and we all know that video is an important, has emerged as probably the most important medium on the network. Cisco estimates that 64% of all of today's internet traffic is video and by 2019, that will be 84%. So we are increasingly moving away from written to video. So what is high speed? High speed is a bit like your dog. Everybody's dog is special. Mine is really special. If you were on dial-up and you wanted to transfer a 250-gigabyte file, it would take you 291 days. So that is internet circa 1995. If you're on, oh, and we go just one step further on ADSL, which is probably what a lot of us in this room have, that same file transfer would only take you three days, 16 hours, and 30 minutes. I still don't have that much time. On the Rian's network, which operates between 1 gigabit per second and 100 gigabits per second, it would take either 31 minutes or 18.62 seconds. Think about that, 18 and a half seconds to transfer a quarter of a terabyte. That means you can do things on this network that you cannot do on other kinds of networks. And that's what CineGrid is all about. It is about the convergence of these high-speed networks and very, very high-quality media. So its mission is to build an interdisciplinary community that focuses on the research, development, and demonstration of networked, collaborative tools to enable the production, use, preservation, and exchange of very high-quality digital media over photonic networks. So a lot of times when you talk about a network, you talk about the distribution of content. CineGrid is about the creation of content. It is about how we work together locally and remotely to build movies and images and multimedia of immense scale. Who is CineGrid? Well, there might be some names on this list that you may recognize. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. They're science and technology counsel. They have a little show in March. They give away little statues. There's a little less-known show in February where they give away certificates, and that's for the science and technology nerds like me. Beijing Film Academy. California Academy of Sciences, which is very similar to our host, Taepapa, here today. Other people like Walt Disney Studios, Lucasfilm, Skywalker Sound. So it's an interesting amalgam of industry, academic, and even government. So as I mentioned before, it's this convergence of high-speed networks and really high-quality media that motivates CineGrid. And looking over the long history of media development, we see that there are basically three large categories of our societies that drive these innovative technologies. There are entertainment, media art, and culture, which is largely what CineGrid focuses on. Science, medicine, education, and research, which is a new direction for CineGrid. And then military intelligence, security, and police, which is not an area that CineGrid really touches on. But they do share some commonalities. In fact, working for the Navy, the Navy was one of the largest producers of video in the United States. There's a lot of drones. But adoption of these digital media means that we face convergence in all three of these areas. So whatever touches on the military may also touch on the media and the arts, may touch on science and research and medicine. Fast networking for distributed applications, we live in the cloud now. I used to give a talk called Get Your Head Out of the Clouds. But I can't give that talk anymore because we are in the clouds. We have access to shared devices. We can share computing resources. We have specialized computers and massive storage. If you could teleport someone from 15 years ago into today, they would be astounded that you could have 128 gigabyte flash drive in your pocket. That's more storage than exists except for on the very top level of supercomputers. We do have collaboration tools for distributed teams. We call them Skype and FaceTime and TeamViewer and on and on and on. They have their limitations and we work in CineGrid to break down those limitations. We have robust security for intellectual property. We have higher quality sound and picture, and I'll talk a little bit about that. And we have the next generation of trained professionals. So that is a key theme for CineGrid. We're about training that next generation in these collaborative partnerships. So what's a big image? This is not an HD image here. So you probably can't read this, this tiny little font down there. But if I were showing you, it's probably not even HD. It's probably a VGA or maybe something less than that. But if I were showing you an HD image, you'd want to be about three picture heights away from it to have the best clarity. In 4K, which is quadruple HD, about a picture height and a half. At 8K, which is four times 4K, 16 times HD, 0.75 screen heights away from the subject in order to be able to see all of the detail included therein. That means that 100 degree of your view is going to be filled with image. That means you'll have a more immersive, evocative experience. But it also means you're going to have a lot more data to contend with. So this is our little data pyramid. It should be inverted. But I didn't build this, I stole it from Lauren here. We have consumer HD, and that can exist in about 4 megabits per second to about 25 megabits per second. So that means if you have an ADSL connection and you want to watch a Netflix show and HD, you're good to go. As long as your neighbors aren't doing all that same thing at the same time, then you're going to have some buffering. But if you wanted to watch stereo, you're going to need 20 megabits to 3 gigabits per second. 3 gigabits is 3,000 megabits per second. That's faster than your home network, but maybe not faster than your network if you work at a university or a research institute. Moving up beyond that, we'll need compression to deal with these things. And at the very top end, that 8K video at 60 frames a second is an astounding 192 gigabits per second. That's twice as fast as the fastest network known to man. So we're not there yet. What we try to do in CineGrid, though, is connect the creative people to the technical people. And it turns out that video is a really good media for network engineering. Network engineers love it because it fills the pipe, and the audience is like it because when it goes right, it looks spectacular, and when it goes wrong, you can tell. So video, turns out, is an excellent way to test the robustness of a network. But content creation is very hard. In CineGrid, we don't tell somebody, don't use your tool, use our tool. We would never say that to an artist, probably not even to an engineer. What we say is, let us put a little secret sauce in the middle. Let's connect you with your collaborators over these high-speed networks. Let's give you tools that seem familiar, but connected up in new ways. So you might see something like a sound engineer working on the same soundboard like we have here, but the soundboard is also on the network, and it's driving an audio rendering engine 150 miles away, or 500 kilometers away. So with CineGrid, you could have a colorist in Los Angeles, principal photography happening in Vancouver, and the director to be in San Francisco, and everybody gets connected up, and they work as if they were in the same room. So that's kind of one of the goals. I just want to do a quick survey of some of the projects that we've done in CineGrid. So this is an underwater camera test, a 4K camera in an underwater housing done by Adam Ravich of Arctic Bear Production, and he was generous enough to donate this to the CineGrid Exchange, which is our online content repository. This is a demonstration that we did last year. We had a patient in San Diego, a general practitioner in Queenstown, connected to him over 100 gigabit per second network in Queenstown, and a specialist doctor in Chicago, and this is Dr. Margolis, and he's a dermatologist. So we conducted a three-point telemedicine demonstration where we had the doctors in remote locations directing a technician in San Diego to do an examination of this patient. I gave a talk earlier in the year called the two-meter mole, and it was really two meters tall. This is a piece that was recorded very early in 2007 for the Holland Festival. It's an opera called Erlanote, and it was the first time that 4K video was transmitted over the Atlantic with 5.1 surround sound for the Holland Festival. And I can tell you, being in the auditorium in San Diego and listening and watching on this giant screen was nearly as good as being there. It was really an amazing experience. This is a taiko demonstration, and you can see that we have a live actor. We have an actor that's being beamed in from another location, and then we have a third actor that's having his motions captured over a motion capture system that's just being represented by an avatar. This is digital film restoration. It's a remote collaborative project from K.O. University of an early film from the Kobe region. So the detail in the film is visible on some of these very large displays, and the film restoration people work collaboratively to fix it. This is a piece that I did. We took a 4K streaming camera. There were only a couple of them in the world at the time, and we put it up in a blimp. So you get to do stuff like that when you work for the Navy, and I was just walking across campus one day, and I said, I really want to put a camera up in the air on it, but I can't put one on an airplane because there's too many vibrations, and I don't want to put one up in a balloon because I want to be able to steer it. Does anybody have a blimp? And sure enough, the Navy has a blimp, so this is me on a blimp. This is a piece that was done by an art student in San Diego called Shizuka, and each of these frames is hand drawn over a 4K video, and of course, for all of these, there's sound and picture. Richard Weinberg at the University of Southern California does remote microscopy, and he puts a 4K camera on a microscope and shares the images with collaborators around the world. Imagine this technology in the context of curation, preservation, and restoration at a place like Te Papa, where you can be sharing this very finely detailed work with a collaborator somewhere else, let's say at the Smithsonian or the British Museum. Here we're doing 4K interactive digital cinema color grading from CinePost and Prague down to Cal IT2 in San Diego, and we have set up in the lower right-hand corner of this the same workstation as this guy would have if he were in his lab in Prague. This is a growing documentary, this was a documentary that was sourced from social media about the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan, and it was a 4K project by students from KODMC Media School, and they used social media to reach out to people to get photographs and video, and they put together a very moving 10-minute piece. This is another one of my projects, it was the world's first dual live streaming 4K, and it took an image from the Monterey Bay Aquarium and sent it down to San Diego and Tokyo. This was the technology that they used to simulcast the 2012 Olympics and the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Joining CineGrid provides an integrated approach to funding and collaboration, a framework for groundbreaking digital media experiments, a forum for members to exchange knowledge and information, access to CineGrid exchange, digital media content. You can see it if you Google CineGrid Exchange, you can see it streaming. Joining CineGrid gets you the actual uncompressed stuff and a host of other things. I've intimated that we do remote collaboration, and how do we do that? We build these things called Optiportals, and we run a middleware called SAGE, Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment. This is the SAGE cave at EVL, it's gigantic, it's a 270-degree circle. It costs about $3 million. Not everybody can afford one of those. Some people build smaller ones, and some people even build smaller ones than that. This is the one we built at Rians. It's 4K televisions that we bought at Harvey Norman or Smith City for a couple of thousand dollars each. It's attached to a rendering cluster and the network. This is the device that we use for the three-way medical telepresence demonstration. We also do academic publications, so if you're an academic, we usually publish in the future generation computing system. I just edited a special issue that should be coming out very soon. But most importantly, we build community through workshops and collaborative projects. This is a group photo from the CineGrid workshop last year. We'll be having one in San Diego again this year. The first time I went in 2007, which was, I guess, the second one, I was so excited I couldn't even sit in my seat. It was just really, really great. It was a great vibe like we have here at MDF. This is a shameless plug. If you're interested, these are the kinds of topics that are covered. We'll be releasing the CineGrid agenda for the 2015 workshop in beautiful San Diego. This is the slide that is my call to action. CineGrid is about innovation and about community. It engages its members in new areas of rich media-intensive forms of art, entertainment, distance learning, scientific visualization, remote collaboration and international cultural exchange. It is an economic driver of the future. I heard someone this morning say that milk prices were down. Well, the creative class is growing and it's a huge economic engine. The New Zealand government is funding ultra-fast broadband. They are a major funder of the Rians network. And I believe that CineGrid has a place in Wellington as a hub of digital creative arts, of digital cinema. I think that it could be a leader in Australasia in this area. So that's all I have. I've got more slides, but I won't talk about the digital dilemma today. That's another topic. Here's my contact information. I am available for questions for a few minutes. Am I not leave? I know that was a very high speed talk, lots of data, but hopefully I've inspired you to reach out and connect with me to build this community here in New Zealand. You've been stunned into silence. Let's say you're a local library and you have a library near to university and there's a lot of science, technology and art happening in that area. How would you get connected to CineGrid and start to make use of some of that? Is it open? Is CineGrid open to that sort of collaboration? Certainly is. So one of the things that we saw in the Netherlands, which is a local chapter, where a group of like-minded people formed a local chapter of CineGrid and they approached the Amsterdam City Council and they said, we would like to make a drop in space where anyone can come in and utilize these infrastructure heavy resources. So they built a small editing bay, they purchased a 4K display device, they got a couple of cameras and they invited the community to come. One of the invitees was a group of local college students and each one of them made a one minute piece. It was called one minute 4K and they each made a little one minute piece with this equipment and were able to get themselves exposed to this creative process. Then those were all packaged up together and shown at the CineGrid workshop. So this tiered approach let people who might not have all of these resources participate. If I were a local library next to a university it's really more about the project and the collaboration than it is about CineGrid. If you wanted to do something like these short pieces from a student perspective, CineGrid would step in and say, here's the camera, here's the editing software, here's the computer, let's help you with that. Now as an institution you can join the greater CineGrid community. I think non-profits it's $10,000 a year, $5,000 a year or $2,500 a year. You can also join as an individual. My idea is to aggregate and pool our resources and join as a community at some level. But anyone can go to the workshop. It's an open community. So the question was you need to be part of Rian's. Not necessarily. It helps especially if you want to do these large-scale networked demonstrations. But anyone could build one of these remote collaborative displays called the Sage Optiportal. We've built them for as little as $5,000 using very small. That's a community and a window into a larger even than CineGrid group. If you're a school you're likely already connected to some kind of non-commercial service provider. Typically those sorts of infrastructure, those sorts of networks cross paths with the Rian's network somewhere. And it's at those path crossings called points of presence where we make a patch and we connect you in. So you don't necessarily need to be a Rian's member. It helps. But anybody can play.