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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
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
"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
$22,750 retail in us dollars
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
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
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
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
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/
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
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!
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Private Essayist
I thought I had seen this before....
m l
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/11/04/1148246.sht
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
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!
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.
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)?
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.
Personally, I hate flat panels and Trinitron? monitors.
Trinitron monitors offer a very good contrast and a nice sharp image though.
And my opinion is for normal pixel graphics 1600x1200 on a 21" screen is closing to the maximum, unless one does resolution-independent graphics (vectors or 3D modelling) the pixels get too small. I repeatedly need to zoom in the Gimp to see the detail, and my monitor does have a very crisp image. Getting an awfully high resolution on a screen is not always the ultimate satisfaction. On a 19" screen 1280x1024 is pretty much ideal. So if you really want to get 1600x1200 or larger resolution for screen estate, I highly suggest getting a 21" screen.
All this from my experience in the graphic arts field, having worked on 15", 19" and 21" screens. Now there are sure going to be those of you who claim that running 1600x1200 on a 14" screen is so cool, but dude, you only have one pair of eyes for your lifetime. :) And this is just my personal opinion anyway...
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.
While they don't provide any resolution specs that would give it away,
Correction: They do give it away. 3.9 megapixels which works out to three 1280x1024 flat panels. You would do much better taping together three 1600SWs (which are 1600x1024).
Well, the Linux world is pretty slow lately so what else is there for Linuxdot to do? They COULD have posted the latest BeOS 3D benchmarks, but they aren't Linux benchmarks are they? At least we would have had a good discussion.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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...
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"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
...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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