>Fleet Central refused the full video link coming from the Out of Band … Kjet had to settle for a combat link: The screen showed a color image with high resolution. Looking at it carefully, one realized the thing was a poor evocation…. Kjet recognized Owner Limmende and Jan Skrits, her chief of staff, but they looked several years out of style: old video matched with the transmitted animation cues. The actual communication channel was less than four thousand bits per second
>The picture was crisp and clear, but when the figures moved it was with cartoonlike awkwardness. And some of the faces belonged to people Kjet knew had been transferred before the fall of Sjandra Kei. The processors here on the Ølvira were taking the narrowband signal from Fleet Central, fleshing it out with detailed (and out of date) background and evoking the image shown.
What if there was a format that doesn't encode pixels but generates a "description" of the images using AI, of simple shapes to higher-level objects, and saves that in its own format, with a "decoder" that takes this input description format and constructs an image similar to the original, at least to some extent.
Of course this would have many drawbacks like encoding micro details and expressions of people, but still, I'd love to see how far the idea can go.