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I know a guy that works at Evans & Sutherland and works on laser projectors that pump out 30 megapixels of video. He says that 1080p now looks like total crap to him and he won't buy it.

Evans and Sutherland is working on better. They are making a 8000x8000, 32bit color, 60Hz projector. The power consumption is a bit high for most people though, at 5kW. http://www.es.com/products/digital_theater/digista r3-laser.asp

If you're doing it on the cheap and only have three or four projectors, you don't need much of a cluster, just a three or four networked computers. Or, use two dualhead computers.

You'll have a small amount of lag in the syncronization (network + OS + application software) but with some tweaking of the OS network configuration, or using some insanely fast system rather than a network (shared memory backplane?), you might get it to a few ms?

If you want frame-by-frame synchronization you need some specialized equipment driving the projectors, stuff like this: http://www.es.com/products/image+generators/index. asp

(Anyone making a homebrew CAVE want to try using http://interreality.org/ VOS software in it?)

Evans & Sutherland has had a bunch of cities available for 'walk thrus' for years: (not a great link but one can infer what 'legacy dataset' implies)
http://www.es.com/products/software/ect/index.asp

There must be something clever/neat/subversive, er special, about the google truck. I bet it has a terrorist sensor.

ATI has been doing multi-GPU since the R300. Evans and Sutherland has been using multiple GPUs to provide rock-solid frame rates and 24x anti-aliasing for military simulators. ATI have been considering multi-GPU for longer than nVidia and I suspect their consumer solutions will be much more robust and thought out than SLI.

That's exactly what I thought! I remember back in 1993-94 when my wife was at UIowa, hanging out at the IDS (Iowa Driving Simulator, as it was then called, back before it turned into NADS and got shiny new digs a few years later), watching her drive a Taurus around a simulated Iowa City (generated by an Evans and Sutherland CT-6) and crash into a simulated Quick Trip convenience store. The big current facility looks even more fun.

I suppose the inventors of computer graphics www.es.com and OpenGL had nothing to do with it.

Doom1 was an excellent 2.5D game when the big iron was already doing full-scene antialiased 3D.

In the form of XGI Dual Volari V8 Ultra, which is nothing but a joke. There's also the ATI-based E&S SimFusion, which won't be of much use in gaming crowd.

No, you're right. I was replying to a poster whom I'm now certain is some sort of anti-OSS troll (and is thus now on my foes list, grrr). He was trying to be whitty and criticize a "Linux user" for using KDE and the MS-isms therein. I made a simple parody of his post but at least two people seem to have missed my point. Maybe because the original post was soon modded as troll, maybe because my post was so short and I didn't qualify it with an explaination. I simply tried to come up with some "features" of Windows that were developed outside of MS (which isn't hard, really).

An anonymous post got the general gyst though.

• Multitasking - Multics, Unix, VMS. This feature goes way back to time-sharing mainframes. It's probably difficult nowadays to ascertain who really did it first.
• GUI - Xerox PARC, Apple, MIT (X), Acorn RiscOS.
• Mouse - Stanford, Xerox PARC, Apple.
• Audio hardware - erm, not really sure. Apple macs and Amigas had built-in sound hardware long before the x86 PC did.
• Accelerated graphics hardware (2D/3D) - Silicon Graphics, Sun, HP, Apollo, Evans and Sutherland.
• 3D API's - IrisGL/OpenGL, PEX.
• LANs and the Internet - Xerox PARC (LAN concept), 3Com (ethernet), Apple (Appleshare?), Unix (TCP/IP), Novell (IPX/SPX).

Show some respect for your elders, or at least know them ;)

I saw one once, at Case Tech, in 1969. About six racks worth of hardware. Nobody really knew what to do with it.