IEEE Spectrum - North American - March 2014 - 39

HVac
cooling system

projector

projector
projector

light farm

movie
TheaTer of
The fuTure
in a mulTiplex TheaTer, a single "light
farm" with powerful lasers-red, green, and
blue-will supply multiple movie-projector
heads, one for each auditorium. The projector
heads will be connected to the light farm by
armored fiber-optic cables, one each for the
red, green, and blue beams. The lasers in the
light farm will be cooled by liquids circulated
through a roof-mounted cooling system.

theaters today show movies in 2K (2 211 840 pixels per frame).
Some motion-picture executives would like to see a migration
to 4K (8 847 360 pixels per frame).
However, as resolution doubles, the uncompressed data required increases by a factor of 4. So, again, the refrain is "more
bandwidth, please."
What does all this mean? If you were to make a 2-hour motion
picture with an extended color range in 4K and at 48 frames per
second, the raw (uncompressed) movie file would occupy more
than 15 terabytes. For comparison, the total amount of data in
all of the e-mails sent in the United States in one year has been
estimated to be 10.6 TB.
All of these parameters-luminance (brightness), chrominance
(color), frame rate, and even laser-pulse rate-will be independently
adjustable on future movie projectors. This controllability will make
the projector more versatile, enabling it to present many different
illustration by

James Provost

levels of image quality. This processing, done on the fly in the projector, will ensure the highest image quality for a given data rate.
These developments will inevitably change movie theaters.
Already, new "projector head" designs are available that contain no light source, only the spatial light modulators and the
optics that create the moving image and focus it on the screen.
Connected by a fiber-optic cable, these projector heads can be
fed with laser light from sources that are tens of meters away.
So it is likely that a future multiplex theater will have a centrally
located "light farm" in which racks of high-power red, green,
and blue lasers will be supported by efficient power supplies
and liquid cooling from the cinema's rooftop HVAC system.
Compact projector heads would hang from the ceiling of
each auditorium in the theater. Red, green, and blue laser light
from the light farm would be channeled into separate armored,
fiber-optic cables that snake through the walls of the theater to
the projection heads in the auditoriums. With such a scheme,
there would be no need for a projection booth in the theater.
The projectors and light farm could be controlled from remote
network operating centers, greatly reducing the overhead costs
of running a chain of theaters.
All of these improvements will require more engineering and
also big, complex, and coordinated system-level developments.
There will have to be more compromises and consensus. And the
payoff is never certain: Some observers contend that a generation has already been trained to be content with the small screen.
I say that there will always be a market for premium, largeformat, truly social entertainment. But we'd better get on with
it. Cinema must evolve if it's going to get us off the sofa and into
the theater. n
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nORTh aMERICan

MaR 2014

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum - North American - March 2014