Am Sonntag, 27.07.03 um 12:51 Uhr schrieb Caroling Geary:
There's a VR object topic in the movie "Tomb Raiders - Cradle of
Life". In Lara's hand is a round object called an "orb". With a tiny
video device (cell phone? PDA?) and a home digital TV satellite dish
she makes a few connections and sends pictures of the orb to her
techie's computer in a helicopter. He is able to read the writing on
the surface of the orb.
Question is how much of this is science fiction and how much is
actually possible with today's technology? Who comes up with these
ideas?
I have not seen the movie but it all depends on the size of images you
want to send. I can send pictures with my cell phone via MMS to other
cell phones. I can send any kind of data to any computer via GPRS.
Granted, the upload speed is not great (1 GPRS slot = 9.6 to 21.4 kbps)
but download speed is ok (4 GPRS slots = 38.4 to 85.6 kbps).
The image size and quality of the built-in camera is made for other
cell phones and, therefore, is small and terrible. :-) It's only
352x288 and has bad jpeg artifacts. The maximum image size on a cell
phone is 640x480. But you can't expect good image quality from those
plastic lenses.
Take a look at the Palm Zire 71 PDA. It has a built in camera and you
could plug in a WLAN card to transmit images directly to another
computer.
Also think of the video phones that nearly every "embedded journalist"
used in the latest Gulf War. The equipment is about the size of a small
suitcase (from what I know of) and includes the satellite dish for live
connections.
So, technically there should be absolutely no problem to do all this.
