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Oh, it's mostly here. You won't want to pay for it, but they are very nice.

These guys make pretty nice displays: http://www.barco.com/

Large seamless displays are not that exotic, they're used all the time for industrial control and monitoring applications among other things.
These guys make pretty nice displays: http://www.barco.com/

I'd tell one brand for high end pro stuff: http://www.barco.com/

Of course there are other brands as Sony but I don't know their products too much and a bit hard to find a thing at Sony site

If he goes to a end user based shop, they will tell SCSI is dead too while its at fiber levels now.

Usual "xxx is dying" thing, its at auto filter here ;)

As I understood it, most people use projectors for this stuff now.
Christie makes a DLP stereoscopic projector with a 150Hz vertical refresh rate:
http://www.christiedigital.com/products/mirageS14K /mirageS14KOverview.asp

Barco also makes a bunch: http://www.barco.com/

... in 8", 9" and even 12". Where's the problem?

Oh, yes the price, size and weight. VDC makes cheaper devices, and if it has to be cheaper still, get a second hand one from ebay and install new tubes (make sure you get a 'fast' green one. Smaller? Get a rear projection box with one of the above devices inside (or two. or three... those were called "reality center") . Smaller still? Get one of the "classic" 24" Sony direct view crts.

Everything you could dream of in CRT-land is still beeing built, and is cheaper than ever second hand.

The article is very vague about the display hardware. Anybody know more? How is this different than the CAVE and other comparable systems?

Immersive Displays:
Fakespace Systems:
http://www.fakespace.com/products1.shtml

Visbox:
http://www.visbox.com/x2.html

Barco:
http://www.barco.com/virtualreality

I have seen such screens on a daily basis, I do not see what is so interesting about this "research"... This is just a new player trying to play catchup, that's all...

If you go to the site, you can even see some existing installations (network video and all).

Nothing to see, move along...

Check out the following links:

Barco for your projection monitors, mirrors, and rigging equipment. Be prepared to pay $100,000 for a powerwall, and upwards of $1M for a full out CAVE. You may balk at the pricetag, although that's the market value... If you want to try designing and installing one yourself, by all means try... Just don't fool yourself regarding the cost of rigging, purchasing high-quality mirrors, architectural design costs, and purchasing high refresh rate projection monitors (e.g. 100+ Hz projectors). You're talking about industry solutions, so expect to pay industry prices.

Stereographics for your active shutter stereogoggle systems. $3,000 per pair of goggles (they are the best on the market, by the way). So, for a theatre setup, be prepared to spend $30,000 to $60,000 on goggles, or more.

Immersion for your haptics (gloves and such). They start at $20,000 per glove, and range up to $250,000 for a complete two-handed 6-degrees-of-freedom force-feedback system (e.g. telerobotics, telesurgery, and so forth).

After that, look towards OpenGL applications. Java3D can wrap around OpenGL, so Java3D is good too. VRML pretty much died, so don't worry too much about Cosmo Player or derivatives. You might want to check out Sense8, which is a pretty good all-purpose CAVE and VR appication programing environment. It has a number of modules, including WorldUp (for getting your hardware up and running), WorldToolKit (for designing your CAVE applications), and World2World (for connection your CAVE to others). I think licenses run around $50K per module, although I might be wrong... I know that Sense8 has had some internal restructuring within the past few years, so they might have restructured their licensing program.

After that, it's mostly a matter of somebody on your team learning how to program OpenGL or Java3D really, really well.

You want to know about Java3D and why people love it? Try looking towards the medical profession, especially radiology and surgical planning. There are a number of Java3D based DICOM viewers out there for viewing CT and MRI images, such as SPLViz and VisAdd.

The cross-platform portability means that the same CT and MRI images can be loaded up onto the same viewer on both the doctor's office PC workstation, their home macintosh or linux system, or even onto one of the esoteric workstations.

To get a better handle on why this images are needed, read up on this article: Combining Local and Remote Visualization Techniques for Interactive Volume Rendering in Medical Applications, and check out the Stanford-NASA National Biocomputation Center Website.

Once you dive around those articles and websites, you'll realize that Java3D supports alot of exotic hardware, such as 5 megapixel LCD monitors, Projection Tables for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Virtual Surgery Tables.

Radiograph images in most hospitals are obtained on VAX or QNX or HP Unix systems, and are then transmitted to Solaris or Windows workstations/servers for post processing. It's typical to have sometype of Oracle database sitting on an imaging archive (we have a 20TB archive, for example), feeding images to the clients sitting on workstations. Sometimes the images are saved as 3D volumetric data, although usually they're saved as 2D slices. So, you need some type of portable 3D viewing application that can sit on nearly any type of box, and can compile the radiographs for whatever local viewing equipment is available...

FYI, medical systems have to conform and perform according to federally mandated law, and there isn't the market pressure to compete with the newest processor on the market. Therefore, priorities are very different in the medical world. Pixel shading and texture mapping are generally on the bottom of our list of importance. True stereoscopic visualization and platform portability are near the top. For our purposes, Java3D outperforms all other competitors, because we *need* the portability, the garbage cleanup of java, and all of the other advantages of Java.

You want to know about Java3D and why people love it? Try looking towards the medical profession, especially radiology and surgical planning. There are a number of Java3D based DICOM viewers out there for viewing CT and MRI images, such as SPLViz and VisAdd.

The cross-platform portability means that the same CT and MRI images can be loaded up onto the same viewer on both the doctor's office PC workstation, their home macintosh or linux system, or even onto one of the esoteric workstations.

To get a better handle on why this images are needed, read up on this article: Combining Local and Remote Visualization Techniques for Interactive Volume Rendering in Medical Applications, and check out the Stanford-NASA National Biocomputation Center Website.

Once you dive around those articles and websites, you'll realize that Java3D supports alot of exotic hardware, such as 5 megapixel LCD monitors, Projection Tables for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Virtual Surgery Tables.

Radiograph images in most hospitals are obtained on VAX or QNX or HP Unix systems, and are then transmitted to Solaris or Windows workstations/servers for post processing. It's typical to have sometype of Oracle database sitting on an imaging archive (we have a 20TB archive, for example), feeding images to the clients sitting on workstations. Sometimes the images are saved as 3D volumetric data, although usually they're saved as 2D slices. So, you need some type of portable 3D viewing application that can sit on nearly any type of box, and can compile the radiographs for whatever local viewing equipment is available...

FYI, medical systems have to conform and perform according to federally mandated law, and there isn't the market pressure to compete with the newest processor on the market. Therefore, priorities are very different in the medical world. Pixel shading and texture mapping are generally on the bottom of our list of importance. True stereoscopic visualization and platform portability are near the top. For our purposes, Java3D outperforms all other competitors, because we *need* the portability, the garbage cleanup of java, and all of the other advantages of Java.

You want to know about Java3D and why people love it? Try looking towards the medical profession, especially radiology and surgical planning. There are a number of Java3D based DICOM viewers out there for viewing CT and MRI images, such as SPLViz and VisAdd.

The cross-platform portability means that the same CT and MRI images can be loaded up onto the same viewer on both the doctor's office PC workstation, their home macintosh or linux system, or even onto one of the esoteric workstations.

To get a better handle on why this images are needed, read up on this article: Combining Local and Remote Visualization Techniques for Interactive Volume Rendering in Medical Applications, and check out the Stanford-NASA National Biocomputation Center Website.

Once you dive around those articles and websites, you'll realize that Java3D supports alot of exotic hardware, such as 5 megapixel LCD monitors, Projection Tables for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Virtual Surgery Tables.

Radiograph images in most hospitals are obtained on VAX or QNX or HP Unix systems, and are then transmitted to Solaris or Windows workstations/servers for post processing. It's typical to have sometype of Oracle database sitting on an imaging archive (we have a 20TB archive, for example), feeding images to the clients sitting on workstations. Sometimes the images are saved as 3D volumetric data, although usually they're saved as 2D slices. So, you need some type of portable 3D viewing application that can sit on nearly any type of box, and can compile the radiographs for whatever local viewing equipment is available...

FYI, medical systems have to conform and perform according to federally mandated law, and there isn't the market pressure to compete with the newest processor on the market. Therefore, priorities are very different in the medical world. Pixel shading and texture mapping are generally on the bottom of our list of importance. True stereoscopic visualization and platform portability are near the top. For our purposes, Java3D outperforms all other competitors, because we *need* the portability, the garbage cleanup of java, and all of the other advantages of Java.

Barco D-Cine Premiere DP100

Ok guys, these games are becoming scarily beautiful and realistic...now where is my virtual reality? Hell, even something as simple as the original Doom series (or even better, Doom Legacy) in fully immersive 3D would be a nice start.

Lawnmower Man? I want that. Come on, it must be trivial now!

Try:
StereoQuake for the stereovisualization code.
Stereographics for the goggle systems.
Barco for the monitor.
Immersion for the gloves and haptic devices.
Windows NT/2000, Irix, and Solaris support most all of this equipment.

Additional applications and systems can be found at Sense8, Fakespace, and Mechdyne.

Have fun... (I use to work as an "information technologies associate" setting up this equipment for a major research universities... you can find your Lawnmower Man style VR equipment in the nuclear engineer and genetic engineering laboratories of research universities.... "Digital Media Laboratory" is another moniker for it....)

We have a few clients that have videowalls for Utility Dispatching that use videowalls by Barco. They seem to work very well, have good resolution and simply hook into a VGA output. We have driven them from laptops even on occassion.

I am in no way associated with Barco, I only know of them from mutual customers.

Nah, I use one of these.

Regardless, I saw AOTC in both analog and DLP modes (at the same theatre on different days) and I definitely saw the difference in DLP, and thought the DLP came out much better, so even if it is just at 1280x1024 it's turning out really well in the theatre (which is really all that matters, I would presume).

These displays are bulky, heavy and take up way too much room. Something like this plasma display would be great. Unfortunately, they still don't have the refresh rate to do stereo very well yet. :-(

Just my 2 cents...

That said, for those of us in places like the San Francisco Bay Area, which has a large number of digital stations, DTV and HDTV are just lovely. On a clear day, my rooftop antenna picks up six or seven digital stations. The picture quality is stunning even on the standard definition stations, much crisper than the clearest cable channels and most DirecTV channels. And HD shows look better than the picture at the local movie theaters. The picture has yet to fail to elicit a "wow" when I've shown it to people.

And the cool thing is, it's on my computer using an ATSC tuner card which means I can record the digital signal to my hard disk for later viewing - not as slick as a TiVo, but adequate. (And before you ask why anyone would watch HDTV on a 17" monitor, the monitor on that PC is one of these, more or less, less expensive than a new HDTV if you buy it used.)

I do wish the prices would come down on more traditional HDTV sets and that they'd get the integration issues straightened out so a separate settop box wasn't required. Better market penetration will equal more incentive for the networks to produce more HD shows. But if you're willing to actually learn about what you're buying, the technology is out there and working.

• "the human retina has logarithmic response, thus you want a monitor where the mapping ... is logarithmic as well. If you don't, you are not allocating the numbers in the most efficient way possible."

What you are saying totally contradicts numerous published papers and textbooks on visual psychophysics and colorimetry! The monitor used to display the stimuli in any reputable colorimetry or psychophysics experiment must either already have a linear response like a BarcoView CID421 or be calibrated (approximately) to have, a linear response.

• "The steps are not Mach banding."

Please re-read what I actually said. I said the visibility of steps, not the steps per se, is mainly due to the Mach effect. It seems it's going to be difficult to convince you without taking you through a psychophysics demonstration with a properly linearly calibrated monitor. I recommend you read the excellent account given in Werner and Spillman, Visual Perception, Chapter 7: Perception of Brightness and Darkness.

• "steps ... equally hard to see. This requires a logarithimic mapping..."

I don't agree. Review any of the chapters in "Handbook of Perception: V Seeing", E.C.Carterette and M.P.Freidman (eds), Academic Press, 1975. Brightness perception is much more complicated than you are making out. To understand perception of complex stimuli, you really need to consider a range of phenomena including simultaneous contrast and border contrast effects not limited to Mach bands, as well as high-level perceptual processes such as form perception because they can alter apparently low-level processes like brightness perception based on neural feedback pathways.

• "... the mapping from the real-world light levels to the numbers stored in the image file is not linear either, instead it is the inverse of the monitor."

No, most image sensors based on CCDs actually have a very linear response to light intensity. For a good introduction please read Barco's Color Theory Page, and note their comment about the linearity of scanners.

• "... [logarithmic] human response and [exponential] monitor response ... match far better than a straight line!"

I wish you were only joking. The dynamic range of the eye is orders of magnitude greater than any monitor, and the gamma is not even a constant in the eye which is luminance-adaptive both temporally and spatially.

And what does "match far better than a straight line" mean?

• "the human retina has logarithmic response, thus you want a monitor where the mapping ... is logarithmic as well. If you don't, you are not allocating the numbers in the most efficient way possible."

What you are saying totally contradicts numerous published papers and textbooks on visual psychophysics and colorimetry! The monitor used to display the stimuli in any reputable colorimetry or psychophysics experiment must either already have a linear response like a BarcoView CID421 or be calibrated (approximately) to have, a linear response.

• "The steps are not Mach banding."

Please re-read what I actually said. I said the visibility of steps, not the steps per se, is mainly due to the Mach effect. It seems it's going to be difficult to convince you without taking you through a psychophysics demonstration with a properly linearly calibrated monitor. I recommend you read the excellent account given in Werner and Spillman, Visual Perception, Chapter 7: Perception of Brightness and Darkness.

• "steps ... equally hard to see. This requires a logarithimic mapping..."

I don't agree. Review any of the chapters in "Handbook of Perception: V Seeing", E.C.Carterette and M.P.Freidman (eds), Academic Press, 1975. Brightness perception is much more complicated than you are making out. To understand perception of complex stimuli, you really need to consider a range of phenomena including simultaneous contrast and border contrast effects not limited to Mach bands, as well as high-level perceptual processes such as form perception because they can alter apparently low-level processes like brightness perception based on neural feedback pathways.

• "... the mapping from the real-world light levels to the numbers stored in the image file is not linear either, instead it is the inverse of the monitor."

No, most image sensors based on CCDs actually have a very linear response to light intensity. For a good introduction please read Barco's Color Theory Page, and note their comment about the linearity of scanners.

• "... [logarithmic] human response and [exponential] monitor response ... match far better than a straight line!"

I wish you were only joking. The dynamic range of the eye is orders of magnitude greater than any monitor, and the gamma is not even a constant in the eye which is luminance-adaptive both temporally and spatially.

And what does "match far better than a straight line" mean?

Don't forget Barco.
Barco
The DLP R12 kicks ass...12,000 lumens :).