What is nui?
The New Universal Image format (nui™) is a unique, proprietary, patented file format developed by Pixia Corp. to enable the rapid retrieval, display, and manipulation of massive, high-resolution still or video image files.

What's new about nui™?
The file format represents a quantum leap in performance when managing large data files. Because it achieves this advantage without the need for compression, performance does NOT come at the price of lost data or diminished resolution. The technology is deployed entirely as software, is platform indifferent, and is fully geo-referenced.

How does it work?
The actual technology behind nui™ is, of course, highly confidential. In general terms, converting to the nui™ file format preprocesses data prior to storage to ensure optimal retrieval time from storage devices.

Virtually all storage devices (including disk drives, CD's, and tape) are inherently one-dimensional storage formats. To display a section of a large image, conventional file formats requires multiple access or “seeks” to the storage device. In other file formats, the number of seeks is equivalent to the number of horizontal lines to be extracted from the large image. The larger the file, the more seeks are needed to be able to view the image, resulting in hindered performance. Pixia’s proprietary nui™ file format requires minimal disk activity, regardless of the size of the image to be extracted or the size of the image to be extracted from.

Unparalleled Performance and Scalability
The nui™ file format provides unparalleled performance and scalability since disk activity is minimal no matter how large the original image. Two primary benefits derived from Pixia's nui™ file format are therefore apparent: (a) images of any size (even multi-terabyte-sized) and resolution can be displayed virtually instantly; (b) many people can access massive images on a shared storage system without experiencing noticeable performance degradation as the number of users increases.