Astro Design was showing a novel lens on its 8K camera, the AH-4801-D. It was coupled to a fisheye lens to capture a 180º view of the immediate environment. This was then coupled to a VR headset to illustrate what captured material might look like. Images were OK, but limited by the headset resolution.
The company was also showcasing its high performance computer dubbed HGX-1. It is essentially an Intel Skylake-based server with eight NVidia P100 GPU modules and NVLink technology offering 5X the bandwidth of PCIe Gen 3. Such platforms are common in data centers, but Astro wants to apply then to medical, entertainment and industrial markets.
Specifically, one of the elements they want to focus on is upscaling of 2K content to 8K using deep learning. Deep learning takes a long time and a lot of processing power, so the HGX-1 is designed to reduce the time of these up-conversions, which will be key to generating 8K content.
It showed some photos of the upconverted content, but did not elaborate on how long it took to do the up-conversion. The close-up photos show the original and the upscaled version.
