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The Ultimate Monitor
biscuit nipple sent us linkage to an amazing monitor: essentially, it's 3 integrated flat panels for a gigantic 3.9 megapixel wrap-around display.
Probably costs as much as a convertible, but it sure looks cool.
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What's with all these companies trying to lure us in with their products and never telling us what the bill's going to be? Do they honestly think we'll let these things into our homes and then pay the $27,000 bill? (That being the price from the earlier article).
:-(.
Seriously, a lot of stuff can happen in one year. Has the price of this gone down any? I love the way they stick "low cost" in their product description, when you'd be way better off buying three CRTs and shoving them together if cost-effectiveness is the goal
D
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DVDs should look great on this. However, due to the fact that it is a flat panel, you can only use the native resolution (or a resolution that is 1/x as big, where x is an integer) without having the image either warped or anti-aliased, or even mangled by lopsided pixel sizing. It's like using 640x480 fullscreen on a laptop that has a 1024x768 screen; the output is either sized down, anti-aliased, or pixel-mangled (this pixel is 1x1, that one is 2x1, that one is 1x2, that one is 2x2!)
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
back in the day when everyone took doom to work and installed it on the lan, the id guys gave us a cute little bonus:
-left and -right
this disapeared after doom 1.2, but made a re-emergence in doom legacy.
What this did was quite simple. It provided a wraparound display! by placing monitors to the left and right of the primary display, you could turn your head to look instead of turning your character!
It was essentially multihead for dos...
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Desperation is a stinky cologne
ATI makes video cards, not DVD players. Only the maker of the DVD player is barred by the NDA he signed to become a DVD manufacturer from providing digital video outputs.
This means no stand alone DVD players with non-analog video jacks.
In a PC, everything is "a la carte" so the digital video rule does not make sense and does not apply.
Buy three SGI 1600SW's, pop them out of their cases, duct tape them together, voila!
You can do multiplayer, though only with other Cave Quake players (not too many of those around). When an enemy sneaks up behind you, they really are behind you. The best part, though, is the position sensors on the goggles and your control wand. When you see a rocket coming straight for your head, you don't just hit a key to dodge, you instinctively duck off to the side, just in time to see the rocket blast by your head. If any computer game can scare the living shit out of you, this is it. It's also a hell of a lot more fun to point your arm at an enemy (from your viewpoint, your gun is sort of superimposed over your arm.) to aim, rather than moving a mouse.
The whole cave thing could get a lot smaller and more affordable with large flat panel displays, since they currently cost in the range of $70,000 for just the display system. The floor display would still be a problem, though it would be easier to do a 360 degree display than with the projectors. Even with flat panel displays, you're still gonna need a hell of a lot of cash to get one.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
CmdrTaco, don't you read anything Hemo posts?
8 246
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/11/04/114
The jargon they use for this is "multi-head configuration". I'll just quote one small part of the manpage:
Here is an example of a ServerLayout section for a dual headed configuration with two mice:
- Robert
Lawyers: The Other White Trash.
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I'm sorry, but I guess I agree with a previous poster that the SGI "Reality Center" desk displays are truly awesome!
Your phrasing suggests that our FOV is >180, but it is more like ~120 (that's full angle, not half-angle :)
:)
The simplest way to ballpark it is to look straight ahead, with both arms extended, index fingers extended, pointing up.
Slowly rotate arms backward, while looking forward. When you no longer see your fingers in your peripheral vision you've found the extent of your FOV.
Of course, this is not perfect because: 1) it's hard to keep your eyes looking straight ahead 2) since you know where your fingers are physically, I think you can fool yourself into to thinking you see them, when you're actually mentally visualizing where they are (just a hypothesis based on the past 5 min
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
Damn I gotta read more before I post. The Reality Center Room is pretty much exactly what that university I mentioned in a previous post had. I'm not sure the whole thing was from SGI, though. I'm pretty sure that there are other people who will build something like that for you, if you have close to a hundred grand to blow. (It just might be worth it if somebody ports Half Life and Counter-Strike to it.)
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
You mean "prawn", right?
http://www.naildrivin5.com/davec
The Detroit Science Center has a concave-IMAX theater. The image is a bit distorted, since the films are designed for a flat projection screen, but it's worth it for the fact that the movie extends far into your peripheral vision. The camera shots from a low-flying helicopter create a really impressive sensation of movement, since your entire field of view is covered by the screen and you have no visual reference to tell you that you're not actually moving. I can only imagine what that would be like with some 3D technology thrown in...
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
But the "consumer-grade" 2.4MP PV230 (same website) is only $9995, according to the review in the last Air & Space Smithsonian magazine.
Information wants to be free -- but informants want to be paid.
Of course, I just want a 12ft x 9ft display wall in my living room -- now THAT would be worth 20K.
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
Being one to do the vi-editor CTLR-z thing, I haven't got much use for even the multiple panels under X, but I'd still go for the thing just so I could fire up the Zooropa tour in my living room.
---------
Once in a while you get shown the light,
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Once in a while you get shown the light,
In the strangest of places, when you look at it right -
Also, several people have been debating how they would hook it up. My vote: A quad-output single video card and Xinerama (or something like that) that essentially extends the virtual desktop idea to work on multiple monitors. It would be nice to be able to scroll to the right of the screen and have my cursor actually go there. (Of course, then you might have to occasionally hunt around for it...)
Then again, I've never used either... 8(
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
I thought I had seen it on here before when I saw that image of the airplane displayed on the monitor. After reading your message with the link, I instinctly clicked it to see the original article.
/. just got another ad view from me. Hmmm, in fact, they got 3 page views from me for the same story: the original, the one posted today, and back to the original to verify their screw up."
/. be doing this ON PURPOSE to get more ad revenue?
Then I thought, "Hey,
Could this be part of the conspiracy? Could
...or maybe not.
load "linux",8,1
"Just slap three really nice video cards in your PC grab three of a really nice brand of "standard" LCD monitor on the market, like IBM's or Viewsonic's, put them all right next to each other (look for a brand of LCD monitor with a very slim edge around the viewable display to maximize screen display and minimize the clutter between screens) and use new new XFree86 beta with its panoramic multi-head support thingie (I forget what it's called) and get pretty much the same results.
/. that got a +3 score (no 4 or 5's at all). I figured if it worked then, it should work for me this time... maybe I shouldn't have said anything.)
Let's say really nice video cards are $200/ea and really nice LCD monitors are $1200/ea, that puts you at $4000 even to do virtually the same thing this $27,000 mostrosity costs. The only difference being that you'll have three seperate pieces of monitor instead of one.
That actually looks pretty much like what these guys did except they have a custom case they put the three seperate monitors into and built a custom connector so that you only have to plug one cable into your PC instead of three.
If you're any good at hardware, I bet you could even take your LCD monitors out of the plastic cases and come up with some way to mount them so they would be literally right next to each other and do it for a lot less than the $23,000 difference in price between buying one of these and making one...."
(actually, this is the text from one of three replies from the first time this was posted on
load "linux",8,1
I worked in a lab at NASA Ames research center that had something much like a virtual atc tower. It was a HMD setup which was fed near real time data and used an HMD with transmissive optics. The result is that the air traffic was overlayed onto the real world. The purpose is obvious: allow air traffic controllers to "see" planes even when they are obstructed by fog, rain, etc.
Here's the site&l t;/a>
"Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the most surely the one wasted." -Sebastian Roch Nicol
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How come no one's making larger flat-panel monitors by arranging smaller panels in a grid? is it just that there are few people willing to pay for something like that? or are there insurmountable technical difficulties (apparently, it can be done with 3 panels in a row; why not 2x2, 3x3 etc)?
LCD panels can never be photographed perfectly. Take a look at the screenshots of DOOMD (DOOM for the Digita OS cameras); all of those shots were taken with a camera, so there's plenty of glare and not enough light from the screen. For this reason, companies have to insert a rendering (or a screendump) from the product and superimpose it over the screen.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...
I prefer CRT based monitors anyway. They are more fun to drop out of a window when they get old or break. Find a local high school that's upgrading to new Windows machines (high school can be a dreadful place) and get some of their old Apple IIe's, and let the mayhem begin!
Oh one more thing: this thing is a beauty. Too bad it probably won't have Linux drivers! You'll have to dual boot into Win2K to use it! *snicker* Somebody prove me wrong and write an open source driver as a side project, please.
DVDs that display a different angle on each monitor, perhaps?
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I have always wanted a wrap-around effect for gaming. Does anyone remember the cool thing you could do by networking doom between 3 computers and having each one be a different perspective? (front, left, right) That blew me away. As soon as some type of technology gets cheap, I'm buying it and changing my game field of view to 180, baby! I think that I would prefer a big scoop dish-type screen like the one that was recently posted.
I'm on a chair.
...........are condemned to reread it.
m l
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/11/04/1148246.sht
$22,750 retail in us dollars
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
Make that refreshing /. and getting first posts
Good thing my vid card has one.
I went to the trouble of hooking up a second monitor so that I could spread my desktop across two screens. I have to say that it's turned out to be not so big a deal. It's generally more of a nuisance to have to swing my head around to find what I'm looking for. Except for those occasions when I really need the extra real estate (putting the Illustrator or Photoshop toolbars over on the other screen while leaving the other for the drawing is one example), I find it much more convenient to just put everything on a screen directly in my field of view. Now if I were running Flight Simulator or a game like Quake where peripheral vision and a wide field of view are beneficial, it might be a different story. But in my day-to-day work, it's a big ho-hum. For anyone contemplating a fancy screen setup, I'd say try to produce it with CRTs and see if you really like it before buying an expensive flat-panel system.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
I read slashdot very frequently. On a slow day I might load the front page over half a dozen times but still out of the recent duplicates I noticed only one or two. Good stories deserve to be reported more than once! (unless it has already become obsolete)
It seems almost like someone has created a script that automatically compares a posted story to the old ones and once a match is found posts a response accusing the staff of incompetence. Grow up.. There are so many new readers that can bring new arguments to the topics. Maybe it wasn't even dealt with proprely the last time..
"But mom, I just had ice cream six months ago? Can't I have something else? - Shut up and eat! ..or go to your room and stay there."
Would it be cheating using it for Counter-Strike?
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It depends on the application. The last time this was posted, we actually called the company up and check on the price for it (and the killer Wall monitors - our's is getting old). For what we do, the three angled screens is a lot more productive and realistic than the "Reality Center" would be.
-- toolie
You're right about those low flying camera shots... it's a strange sensation.
I've also been to the IMAX Theatre in Spokane, WA. If you've ever seen the movie about the Explorer's in Arctic... (or was it Antacrtic??) The room becomes extreemly cold.
"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
-- Ernest Hemingway
Foget figuring out why the universe is here... just get me one of these and Flight Simulator and I'll be happy.
The PS2 has a firewire jack. I do not yet know if you can output video through it, but you can certainly output through it - otherwise what would be the point in having it?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Mine is way closer to 180 than 120.
Mabe about 165. Try wiggling your fingers while you do it. when you can no longer see movement at the eges of your FOV, then you move your fingers back until you can again.
"A witty saying proves nothing." -Voltaire
According to a quick search, this: article says that our FOV is ~200 degrees horizontally, and ~150 vertically.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
If you read the info on it, under the 3D section is says: "(Note: the display is not suited for active or passive stereographics)"- -------------------------------
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
You know you are a linux guru when you code without monitor, and it compiles.
I'd rather have a Kramer IMAX Monitor!
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Life is a race condition: your success or failure depends on whether you get the work done on time.
Perhaps you didn't notice that among the 12 "discreet" inputs of the PV290 DSK are three standard RGB inputs. No special drivers necessary, just plug the 3 screens into three video cards and go.
More importantly though, you shouldn't give up on the idea just because Panoram Technologies costs too much. Buy three flat screens and a sports car.
Lawyers: The Other White Trash.
for DVD movies (wide screen) and gaming?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I was thinking in terms of eyes fixed, looking forward, but ff you allow for eye movement, then 200 full-angle FOV is believable. I glanced at the site and didn't see an explicit comment on whether they considered eye-tracking.
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
I'm still waiting for affordable Laser Projectors with VGA input, so I can project my Natalie Portman porn collection on the clouds ;)
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
Could be. I should check my optics books to find the typical value. And, like all other vision issues, it will vary from person to person. I'd gauge mine to be in the range of 120 - 160.
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
Get enough of these panels connected, and you could surround yourself. Talk about first-person shooter game immersion! When someone sneaks up behind you to shoot, they would really be behind you!
________________
________________
Private Essayist
Yeah, it may be designed for industrial strength but that doesn't always make it great. I have a dishwasher that has stainless steel internals as well as one of those excessively huge commercial stainless steel refridges (cafeteria type ones). And the dishwasher craps out all the time and the refridge overheats. It seems the assumption was that it's industrial and stainless steel, it must be good...
Just because something looks cool and is industrial doesn't always mean it's what it's cracked up to be...
Eye Candy beware...
I thought I had seen this before....
m l
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/11/04/1148246.sht
Hemos posted the same thing on Nov 4, 1999. link. At least they didn't post it twice over the course of a week.
I work on 19" and 21" monitors as well as some large flat screens on a daily basis. This would really make my life easier, except the aspect ratio looks a little wide. It looks like it would be great for equipment and security monitering, being able to see many things at once....
-Moondog
Wow...I don't even want to know the price on that bad-boy!! Yipes!
And if it were to ever break (the repair costs must be astronomical) it'd make one hell of a lounge chair, just flip that sucker on its side and throw some cushions on it!
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
three flatpanels and three video cards is probably better off, depending on how much it really costs.
:-)
So much for flatpanels being a way of freeing deskspace
# debian/rules
There was an article about that company's products just under one year ago right here on Slashdot.
Look at this on insteed on Slashdot on the november 4, last year. it's is the same. Yes always the same. Only a graphics. It's real ? No of course ! It's made in gimp and blender to sell banner on this site.
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
Yeah, but you still have your heart set on it, Rob.
Personally, I hate flat panels and Trinitron(TM) monitors. Flat panels can only handle its native resolution or a smaller one that's 1/x as big (where x is an integer). Trinitron(TM) monitors always have that dark horizontal line across the screen, about 1/4 of the way up from the bottom. Also, Sony makes a buttload of cash every time a manufacturer uses the word "Trinitron(TM)" on their monitor. This dark line often gets in the way in full-screen applications, and it is a downright nuisance in graphics applications. I like Trinitron(TM) on television sets, but it's just too useless on computer monitors.
So, what's left for me to like? A good old, spherical CRT. I have my heart set on a 19" model with a .23 inch dot pitch (up to 1920x1440!). That should ease my eyes, as right now I have a 15" monitor on 1024x768.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
OMFG... Add a whole new dimension to SSH login! The colors! The colors!!
http://siokaos.org/
Well, naturally!
Of course, this would give the enemy an all-around ability to frag your puny body into a mist of blood and gore that settled slowly into the bubbling lava surrounding the narrow pathway on which you foolishly ventured, but hey. It'll look cool! :)
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
Our FOV only extends a couple inches beyond 180degrees of our head, why have such overkill?
http://siokaos.org/
That's why you'll NEVER see a digital video output jack on a DVD player.
The ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder does MPEG-2 acceleration and has a DFP (Digital Flat Panel DVI-I) output. Wouldn't that qualify?
It wouldn't be illegal, anyway; it would be a contractual violation if DVD decoder licensing required manufacturers not to provide digital output.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
It wouldn't be illegal, anyway; it would be a contractual violation if DVD decoder licensing required manufacturers not to provide digital output.
Correction: add to the end of this statement, ", but the licensee added one anyway." A contract requiring DVD licensees not to provide digital outputs would be legal under U.S. law, but ATI seems to be evidence that no such licensing regulation exists.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
The proof is in the puddin'!
:)
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
Actually my 96 Mazda Miata (30k miles) cost me $10k.
This thing costs $22,750 (us dollars).
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
Just a reminder about this 38" flat panel display...
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/02/20/1030249_F. shtml
Not panoramic though, but they combine multiple displays similarly. However, I think that the prototype can only do 800x600 currently.
Lets see. I just checked outpost.com, and they're selling a factory refurbished IBM 1024/768 monitor for $89.95.
Thats $112.38/ megapixel.
Thats 199 megapixles for $22,750. I guess I'm going to go buy 256 of these so I can make a 16x16 grid of them on my bedroom wall.
Now, wouldn't that be cooler?
spreer
(yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I don't have the hardware to drive 256 displays.)
The previous poster isn't talking about what's displayed on the monitors. If I remember from the last time this monitor was posted on here, the picture of the actual monitor was done as an artist's rendition, and there was nothing being displayed on the screen. What the previous poster wants to see is an actual picture of the monitor. Makes it seem more real, y'know?
Yup, which is as big as a 20" CRT, and many 21" CRTs... with three of them, that's not too shabby.
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
It's maddening to see how slowly flat (LCD) screens are improving in price/performance. Five years ago I would have predicted that in 2000 most new screen sales would be flat. Now I think that we're still 3-5 years away from that.
Just think of the energy savings alone! (Not to mention a savings in office furniture costs--you don't need desks that are as deep with flat screens).
--- Speaking only for myself,
slashdotted!
this is a left handed sig
--
EFF Member #11254
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
I'd hire ppl to go run and tell me whats on my monitor.
ATI is a canadian company, any laws would have to be legal in canada to affect them
I'm always suspicious of products where the 'photo' is actually a computer rendered artists impression, as the picture on the linked page clearly is.
Is there an actual photo of the device anywhere on the site? I can't find one.
If these things are legit and as impressive as the website claims, why are there no actual photos? Instead there are just some spiffy looking computer generated images...seems odd to me.
-incongruity
I saw these a while ago, and have just been itching to post about them.
If you're a UNIX geek (such as myself), checkout SGI's Reality Center Walls. Be sure to checkout the large images of the Reality Center Walls and Reality Center Room. They're awesome, but the price will make you toss your cookies.
HP makes something similar, but I'm having trouble finding it again on their web page. Any idea what it's called guys (and gals)?
"The Panoram PV290 DSK is compatible with nearly all computing platforms including Apple Mac OS, HP, SGI, Sun and Windows/NT."
While I can't imagine the monitor not being Linux and *BSD compatible, it's interesting to note just who they think their target market is. After all, if you're willing to shell out hundreds for an overpriced OS and the hardware to run it, you're obviously overfunded enough for this sort of thing.
Integraded??
I think you mean integrated.
<SIG>
I think I lost my work ethic while surfing the web. If you find it, please email it to crispy@crotch.caltech.edu.
</SIG>
My sig has a broken link in it.
I live life on the edge
I saw one of these at a trade show earlier this year. Seriously cool and seriously expensive. I don't remember the exact price but $20,000 US seems to stick in my head. My memory could be faulty however and the price may have dropped significantly since then. Can't really say I need one but I certainly wouldn't turn my nose up at one either!
Now - I want one of THESE, integrated with one of these from the Ultimate Chair article the other day - I think the Aura model, with the air curculation and rotation and customizable overhead lighting... yeah... this is getting closer.
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
The article says that there are 12 different inputs, including video, s-video and digital. It also hints that you can run the panels seperately from each other, for that multi-screen batcave feel. It would appear possible to play dvds on one panels, while browsing slashdot and keeping an eye on your security camera on the other panels.
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Desperation is a stinky cologne
I have less objection to a rendered simulation of screen contents being overlayed on an actual photo of the monitor itself. However, the entire image of the monitor, keyboard, mouse and monitor display is computer generated in this case.
The contents may not be photographable (is that even a word?), but the actual monitor itself certainly is. It makes the product look like a scam if the photo is completely faked.
Anyone else get deja-vu? This monitor looks just like the one every computer in Deux Ex looks like (blue though) :).
The second that I hit the page, I said to myself... this has been posted before. Sure, there are people who check /. every few days to see what is new, but I would be willing to say that many avid /.ers remember things like this.
I have no problem when things are posted several times. I just think it is sad when a cool technology has a website that doesn't change in over a year.
Just my $.02,
"Perhaps most amazingly, votaries of 'diversity' insist on absolute conformity." -- Tony Snow
Cool display but you need a high fill rate to drive that many pixels. The simple solution for fill is to use multiple machines to drive the eyepoint, as seen in this version of Quake on 6 monitors: MultiVisQuake.mov ~2MB Sorry, that Quake won't see the light of day because of the GPL and the commercial API used to develop it.
A trade of service
Vendor hark, send free sample:
Marketing haiku!
Hmmm, the 21" FD Trinitron (the flattest CRTs available) are ~$950-1100 each. That and they take up a lot more real estate than a few flat panels (which is where the real savings comes in). The cost of this particular screen set is quite ridiculous, but the idea is good. The SGI "Reality Center" displays are an amazing thing to behold - I've been lucky enough to see one in person (can't actually afford that, either).
Kind of like a computer chair - $80 for the chair that I used for the past couple years at home (until the welds broke), $800 for a Hermann Miller Aeron (mmmmmm). I can tell you that when I had one of those at a previous job, the cost of the chair was well worth the comfort and relief (bad back and all). Sometimes good things are worth paying for - I'd like some of my desk back from my 21" monitor...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
looks rather nice, but i do think it coulda been slightly more...i don't know... sexy? It's a bit "hard", although obviously very lovely indeed, I think I would in fact prefer that nice new Sony one that came out recently instead. It just looks so much more beautiful. Oh I could stare at that all day. This one probably requires head movements- asking a bit much I think... particularly for the price. I mean, what do they think we are? I've perfected the art of not moving anything other than my fingers unless absolutely necessary. Even if it only requires the movement of eyes I still think it's a bit much... Still given the choice between that and my present lovely monitor, I think I'd probably go with that one any day...
This is old, I remember seeing this last year!!!
Hold on, maybe I'm in a time wrap...
>$ date
>Fri Oct 20 13:33:43 EDT 2000
Nope! Hmmm,
>$ pwd
>http://slashdot.org
AH!! Ok, I'm not in a subspace bubble...
MarNuke
now my command line is REALLY big, whoo hoo!
...pron, right? They are always the first to use technology like this. VCR, Internet, DVD... so if you buy one soon, enjoy your pron!
.sigs??
-- Don't you hate it when people comment on other people's
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
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