High definition video content is broadcast daily into millions of American homes.
While various flavors of HD exists (720p, 1080i,1080p) there has been an undeniable trend towards higher resolution and better fidelity.

4K Resolution Beyond the current commodity high definition (best resolution of 1440*1080) is the world of digital cinema, aka as 4K. 4K offer resolution of 4096*1714 with an average of ~8 million pixels. [1] As Theo Mayer notes, "Whereas new formats typically represent some 50-70% improvement in resolution to the previous generation, 4K represent an over 325% leap in a single step over the just establishing 1080p (1920h X 1080v) standard. It represents an incredible 500% leap over the current DLP based SXGA+ (1400h X 1050v) format!"

While 4K technologies are not yet common the costs for both the cameras necessary for content creation and the projectors for display are rapidly declining. Within a three year period, we will likely see 4K in commercial movie theaters and within six years our homes.

4K VTC What changes will 4K technologies have on collaboration and science? First, the ability to stream 4K real-time video will finally realize the often hyped promise of video being "just as good as being there." The 4k resolution will allow our collaborations at a distance to occur at the resolution of digital cinema. As these types of collaborations become more common they will act as an application driver for broadband networks. To date most tests with uncompressed real-time 4K video teleconferences have relied on multiple 1 gigabit lambdas.[3]

Second, 4K technologies will change the nature of scientific visualization. One of the challenges of high performance computing is how to deal with the massive data sets produced. Regardless of application area, the reality is the most plausible way to understand terabytes of data is through interactive visualization.[4] Best available display technologies today require us to "dumb down" visualizations so they can be viewed on the desktop. 4k will remove this barrier and allow us to have much richer interactive visualizations. We will finally be able to see what we have been able to compute.

Third, our paradigm for approaching sources and displays has been a one to one relationship. We have done this so we can combine multivariate data without compromising resolution. 4K projectors are currently designed in such a way as to break this paradigm. Put simply, a 4K projector can be fed by multiple inputs which are then simultaneously displayed.[2] Tomorrow scientists will be able to create desktops as large as movie screens and feed data at high definition resolution to auditoriums of colleagues.