Optical and electronic communication uses vast amounts of bandwidth, essentially for pictures. Clever coding can compress this information, but must still retain enough to reconstruct the whole visual extravaganza at the far end. Yet in many cases pictures convey very little of value, even assuming they are necessary at all. Indeed, DREADCO's information scientists are now writing a special NDP (‘No Damned Pictures’) program for Internet users. It will reject the slow-downloading visual nonsense, while accepting elements of text that actually have something to say.

But even Daedalus regards this as bit extreme. He is looking for a middle way. He points out that a good cartoonist can capture the essence of a scene with a few well-chosen lines. Why is a line drawing so direct and easy to interpret? Our visual system must work largely on edge detectors; yet this cannot be the whole story. A reversed white-on-black line drawing is not nearly so easy to understand. But clearly a vast amount of bandwidth could be saved if the full bit-map of an image could be reduced to an equivalent line drawing.

So a panel of DREADCO cartoonists is making sketches of a wide variety of photographs, while psychologists study their choice of lines, and programmers strive to embody these choices in software. Their pilot program merely looks for continuous boundaries defining a sharp change in visual contrast. It renders these as black lines on a white ground, and ignores everything else. The results are promising, but imperfect. Block colours, added by an electronic ‘painting by numbers’ routine, seem to help a bit. An effective ‘Videosketch’ program will need much greater insight and subtlety; but the thing seems possible.

When perfected, Videosketch will transform business and scientific communication. It will transmit useful material, such as text, drawings, and graphs, almost unchanged. Rococo visual detail, however, will be drastically pruned. Photographs will become sketches, video clips will become cartoon films, video-conferencing will acquire an intriguing surreality. Even entertainment may benefit. Daedalus will be interested to see if video on demand, that great white hope of the cable industry, takes off in cartoon form. ‘Adult entertainment’ might even gain from the stark, compelling simplicity of its Videosketch representation.