Proof that Telstra Bigpond is Throttling Youtube Bandwidth in Australia (video)

I went to the OmniMax theatre at a sort of Technology park in Singapore (about 20 years ago!). I actually haven't seen one anywhere else; the closest is iMax. Anyway, it was a huge hemisphere, enough to cover a large cinema's worth of people. The seats were tilted back by about 45 degrees.

Because my peripheral vision was covered, when the camera tilted, it actually felt like everything was tilting. The movie I saw was taken from a plane, and so this happened whenever it banked. The bandwidth needed was massive - IIRC, they used seven 35mm cameras, and superposed them with seven projectors. The sound was via speakers placed at various locations behind the hemisphere.

I've seen a couple of iMax movies (with an extremely large, though flat screen), and the effect doesn't occur. It's a lot more expensive to make a hemispherical cinema, I think. However, I recall a youtube video of a guy doing it within a simple tent (compensating for the corners not being spherical by distorting the image projected).

BTW: you make a nice point about considering sensors in the home, but also consider what sensors it would be great to have, perhaps using yet-to-be invented technology. eg. a sensor that could register the exact 3D contents of a room; or brain activity; or all your sensory input nerves (brain in a tank anyone?); downloadable objects (auto-milling machines - but probably don't require massive bandwidth, unless it was ridiculously high-resolution, say approaching molecular levels - effectively, matter transmission). An interesting constraint is that lag will probably prevent interesting real-time applications.

There maybe hybrid applications, eg to progressively download massive hires textures in a MMORPG or sandbox game or games like the videodisk-based Dragon's Lair (I think the limit here is that they are so expensive for artists to produce in the first place - perhaps the breakthrough needed is a way for amateurs to generate excellent/interesting textures? Perhaps consumer HD cameras will do this). Maybe motion capture, as in project natal (but I think the bandwidth needed is pretty low... again the problem is latency).

Interesting point, but the thing about eyes is that they can look in unpredicted directions, so you need much more data available than just what the eye can process.

This wouldn't be true if we didn't have lag (then we could just stream the right images for where the eye was looking). But our eyes are extremely sensitive to lag - even done 100% locally, it's difficult to be fast enough (or used to be).

To compensate, we can download a whole environment, and track the eyes locally.

I use a 28" monitor with a resolution of 1920x1200. I've watched the same video in 1080p and 720p, and the 1080p is appreciably sharper and more detailed, even accounting for the fact that the 720 version is being scaled to the display's native resolution. It is 2.25 times as many pixels, so there's over twice as much detail possible. It's kind of fun to read the signs and computer monitors in the background of scenes (for example, on a 1080p version of The Island, you can see a character's hilariously disturbing criminal record on a monitor in the background).

As for latency sensitive applications, going from a 2mbit link to a 20mbit link reduces the round trip transmit time (excluding interpacket delays required by common physical links) of a 256-byte packet from ~2ms to ~0.2ms. If both endpoints migrate from 2mbit to 20mbit, then ~3.6ms of latency can be eliminated. The benefits are larger for larger packet sizes, so larger packets can be used (and therefore increased throughput) while maintaining low latency.

I agree, but then in general I don't think that consumers pay more for internet connections for specific features — nor do I think they ever have. I think they pay more because what they have has become a limitation for what they're already doing.