CenturyLink TackleSTEM: Pixels and Data

 In Shopcasts and Videos, Show Me Some Science

We are very excited to partner with CenturyLink and the Denver Broncos Tackle STEM program tor bring you a new series of videos.

This video is about compression and data. When you take a picture, the information is encoded into pixels, little bits of data. The fewer pixels you use, the less information is needed, and the faster it is to transport the data over the internet. As you add more pixels, it takes more time to send the data over the internet, but you are able to see the image more clearly.

We used glass beads to represent the pixels. The picture is submerged in a dark liquid, and can only be seen when the glass beads are put in the liquid. Each glass bead acts as a lens, and shows an average of the colors of the picture below it. More glass beads take much longer to spread out over the picture, but the smaller pixels make the image much easier to recognize.