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Sandia's 20-Million-Pixel, 130-Square-Foot Screen
schauba writes: "Cipherwar has an article describing Sandia National Laboratories' new 10-foot by 13-foot, 20-million-pixel screen. The screen was created to allow scientists to view extremely complicated systems without sacrificing detail. The images are created through a parallel imaging system using 64 computers to generate the output.
This makes my 17" monitor suddenly seem so inadequate." You can also view the same text with pretty pictures on Sandia's site.
do you this thing has anti-aliased fonts. Otherwise on such a big display fonts would render horribly.
[penny sized pixels] ewww..
SiliconGraphics has made a lower-resolution "portable" model for awhile now. Not quite the same thing, but neat nontheless.
http://www.sgi.com/realitycenter/rc3300w.html
:)
hawk
> type, tape the sheets end to end, and work on it with a pen
Sounds convenient. It's a pity we can't convince a company to make paper that's already attached like that. Maybe they could even perforate it a bit tos that it would fold nicely without wrinkling the text . . .
:)
hawk
Although this sounds good as first glance, it's actually quite low resolution. To get 20 million pixels will be about 5000x4000 pixels. On a 10 foot screen, that's only around 40dpi. Why did they need to make it so large? A 4 or 5 foot display would have shown the same detail in a more palatable display area. I don't see what having it so big buys you...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
From the article: The eyeball is the limiting factor, not the screen
Yeah, sure it is. Throughout the history of time someone with a hard-on for a technology has slobbered away about how it's the last upgrade they'll ever have to do because damnit, it's more than the human eye/ear/senses can detect anyways. How many times have we had the moronic "The human eye can only detect below 60FPS!" arguments on Slashdot (yet I can refute that instantly as there is no doubt that Quake 3 feels smoother at 100+FPS than it does 60FPS, and the sense of natural motion blur is dramatically improved). How many times have people ranted that humans can only see X colors or hear X clarity of sound (both continually being defied).
The next time someone wants to sell their bosses on the idea that this is the last upgrade they'll ever need because it don't get any better practically, they need to stop and pick a different excuse. That particular one has just been proven wrong so many times it is now completely laughable.
Wow. I take it you're in research and it just burns you when research isn't taken as a religion that the unwashed masses simply absorb and believe: There are those of us who simply don't believe (believe in the religious sense of "just because that's what you say") when Scientist XYZ, with loads of documentation to back up their claims, proclaims the truth about something (usually proving exactly what they set out to prove), and months or years later scientist B, with loads of documentation to back up their claim, absolutely overrides the original suppositions and conclusions. This has happened in science countless times, but each time it is presented as this is absolutely, positively true : Look at our methodologies!
A perfect example of this is the number of "images" that the human eye can process per second, with various researchers attempting to come to a static number that quantifies and definitely states what the maximum FPS perceivable is. Of course they almost invariably fail to take into account persistence of vision, which is the concept that even if an entire scene isn't perceived the effects of the "sub-frames" merge together to form a common frame (natural motion blurring). That is what I mentioned about Quake (and it's funny how quickly you'll discount an oberservation: Don't you simply believe? Should I make some tables and package it in a whitepaper? Does that make it more credible?): Any Quake 3 player with a good system would have ZERO difficulty discerning between 60fps, 100fps, and possibly 200fps (or more), yet still there are those who will conclusively state that the human eye cannot see more than 46 FPS, etc. It is quite laughable though. In the case of pixel accuracy simply measuring the number of rods and cones in the eye would be insufficient and a half-measure: The "picture" that we see is the end result of a very intelligent system which may, for instance, do sub-pixel integration via "jitter" (i.e. you may have 20,000,000 "pixels" in your eye, but your eye is never absolutely still, which means that the light hitting your retina is contantly from a slightly different source: When looking at a leaf you are getting information from trillions of rays of light).
P.S. The post is interesting because most people in computers have seen this shit a million times before: Someone stating unequivically that the human ear/eye/nose/etc. can only see/hear/feel/taste/smell XYZ measures. CD is apparently beyond the absolute limit of human hearing (I won't get into the fools who believe that MP3 is beyond the limits of human hearing...), yet strangely they're coming out with DVD audio at 24-bits per sample/96Khz (versus 16-bits per sample/44.1Khz).
It could be done, but it would be expensive as hell if you wanted it to work perfectly. The viewing screens in movie cameras (you know, the kind that they actually make movies with ;-) are actually bundles of tightly-packed fiber-optic cables. They are quite expensive, and most of them have at least one broken fiber in them, resulting in a tiny dark spot. I imaging that doing something like this on a large scale would cost tens of thousands of dollars for just one monitor. Probably cheaper to just use LCDs.
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I don't like to program on the computer screen. I like to print my code on legal sized paper (8.5x14in) in very small type, tape the sheets end to end, and work on it with a pen. Why?
The single long continuous printout makes it easier for me to visualize the flow of the code, how the seperate parts relate to one another. I get a snapshot of the flow by looking a single long printout that I just can't get from a scolling window with a max of about 80 lines. The pen allows me to quickly make annotations and draw relationship lines with a speed and simplicity that is impossible on the screen. In short, the printout contains more data per square inch than my brain can pick out immediately, but being able to see the whole picture in one shot allows me to see relationships and flows that I would otherwise miss. I'm then able to immediately zoom in on important sections while ignoring the rest.
I would assume that these scientist are aiming for the same effect. Being able to have any single piece of the information immediately availble while looking at the whole picture. The point is to quickly draw out what might be important in the whole picture without being distracted by the mechanics of zooming into a detailed section. Instead of saying, "Computer, zoom into grid section E5", the scientist just has to look more closely.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
It also seems like they are using this with whatever is their latest ASCII cluster (Red? White?) to display data off it (I just noticed one of the projects name had ASCII in it - so I am making an assumption here - probably a wrong one).
What I still tend to wonder is - why do those damn projectors still cost so much? I mean, sure - prices have come way down, with higher resolution - but why don't they offer "low-res" consumer models - ie, a 640x480 projector for $500-800? The panels should be dirt cheap to make - and I would bet there is a market for higher-res TV projection systems (people still buy normal - ie, non-HDTV - rear-projection systems), right?
It just irritates me that one can't go out and get a new projection system cheaply (actually, I have yet to even see the high-end projectors being sold at a place like Best Buy or Fry's).
I recently set up a cheesy Fujix P401 video projector, coupled to an Avermedia VGA->TV converter. Good enough to watch VCDs, anyways - and it was inexpensive ($250)...
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When I saw the high-res image (the first one) and saw it was an array of projectors, I said "Eeeeuw! How can they get them all aligned at the edges well?"
When I looked at the 2nd hi-res image, and saw the color mismatch down the vertical center, I nodded to myself and said "Thought so. Bleah!".
But then I looked at that first hi-res image again, and noticed the bizarre shadow. Why is it all squared off? And then I realized--those projecters aren't just aligned at the edges, they're actually overlapping and registering correctly at 40dpi! Have you ever tried to get your company's LCD projector to project a reasonably orthogonal image? I can't get it even close. Now imagine getting two projectors to OVERLAP perfectly at the edges.
Color me impressed.
...but it's only off by about one order of magnitude instead of two. Their 10x13' dimensions yield a diagonal measurement of about 197 inches. A cluster (Beowulf, perhaps?) of maybe a few dozen of these would get you the drive-in-movie-in-your-own-living-room experience...
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
We have the same thing here at PPPL(princeton plasma physics lab). We call it the "high resolution wall." Big whoop. It's a pile of projectors each creating a chunk of the screen. The software isn't the difficult part... the practical difficulty is getting all the images from the projectors to line up. We have several interns working on this at the moment. This is hardly news, as systems like this have been around for quite some time.
heh i work right up the hall from you, in the computational group. :)
Does it run Linux ;) Actually, methinks that this display just might make AA obsolete! Maybe X is more cutting edge than we all thought...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
How exactly is this moderated as interesting? The only interesting thing about this post is how a person can be so deliberately obtuse.
..." is ridiculous! Go ahead then, prove that there's no physical limit.
... has just been proven wrong so many times it is now completely laughable.
... especially if he says that it's been "proven wrong so many times it is now completely laughable."
There are actual quantitative experiments that have demonstrated the limits of photon reception in the human eye. To just dismiss all of this work with, "there is no doubt that Quake 3 FEELS smoother
The next thing you know, he'll be saying that there's no limit to how much energy we consume in a given instant (after all, if the capabilities of the eye aren't fine-grained, then neither is the structure of the body -- surely!)
The next time someone wants to sell their bosses on the idea that this is the last upgrade
The next time that someone purports to defy many many years of research, make sure that you have more than "his word" to go on
If you think that there are no limits to our capabilities for processing colors, sounds, and variations through time, you'll have to ignore an awful lot of biology.
____________________
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The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
While the Sandia Monitor has 20 million pixels, IBM has a monitor that has 9 million pixles but is only 17".
Someone you trust is one of us.
...of the technology. After all, it's just a bunch of standard projection units hooked together so the image spans neatly. It's actually a no brainer to do this stuff since the MacOS (for a decade now) and Windows (98? and up) support monitor spanning.
What they should focus on is the video card technology used to drive this display. Not too many video cards that I know of that can go up to 5120 x 4096.
I suppose there's not too much we can spot with the naked eyes that we can't find with a couple thousand computer years these days, but it's be really nice to visualise complex protein interactions with these. Could be the visualisation tool that allows DNA-computer design to take on new dimensions.
Think about it: Massive numbers of ddNTPs radioactive markers on dna molecules (bear with me - especially if I've got the acronym wrong) all flashing when the nucleotides bind to other molecules. By inferring where those markers are and projecting the rest of the molecule accordingly, you could get a slowed down real-time picture of multiple molecules interacting at massive numbers of points at once! Not just poxy small fragments like RAPDs, but mystery proteins released beside a suspended target cell with marked cell receptors. Yes, I know these are amino acid chains as opposed to DNA molecules.
Ok maybe this doesn't take a 69 MegaPixel monitor, but it'd be fun, wouldn't it? Maybe better than crystallography, which normally breaks the protein..
toeslikefingers.com - because
Some peoples must really like watching their divxs:) hehe
Yes, it should be equally simple to do this from a curved screen, if you get a snug fit. You could even have all the screens sat in seperate places and just string the cables close to each other - no need to be limited by having them a foot apart. Assuming you could get it working of course...
There's probably also some good reason why individual fiber-optic cables have a round cross-section too (I'd guess something to do with refraction), but I didn't really pay as much attention in my optics lectures as I should have done ; )
Finally, setting all this up in an array as you suggest might be a bit tricky. It probably could be done, but whether it'd be worth the effort is questionable. It may well be more appealing (and cheaper) to just buy a bigger screen (or a high resolution projector if you're that desperate) and wait until the technology makes this simpler to do.
First up - I meant really really close to the surface. The monitor I'm using at the moment has a few millimetres of glass between the flourescent bit and the surface. This is going to be an issue with most screens, but more expensive ones seem to have a thinner layer here.
My comment about the display blurring is based solely on my experiences playing around with fibre-optics - it could just be because I was using low quality fibre or something. However, I do recall that when seperate signals are simulataneously sent down fibre-optic cables (as you mention) they use seperate frequencies for each channel (frequency division multiplexing) and de-multiplex them at the other end, so perhaps they do get mixed up. Could be that it's a combination of the two, or that it wouldn't be an issue over a straight 1 foot connection. I'm sure there's someone here on Slashdot who knows more about the subject than me.
Oh, and fair point about the projector.
Hope I made myself a little clearer. If anyone wants to shoot down my answers then I'm all ears (or should that be eyes?).
I was questioning whether the intention had been to simply get a bigger clearer display (motivated by the same reasons that make people swap their 800x600 15 inch screen for a 1024x768 17 inch unit, though to a much greater extent), as opposed to "flooding our sensory input leaving our brains free to do what they do best - recognise patterns, holes and anomalies in the massive amount of data" (as a previous poster put it) - intentionally overwhelming the user's brain to force it to pick out patterns and work differently to how it would on a smaller screen.
Please note - The offensive parent post wasn't written by me. Why on Earth would I post as an AC but still leave my sig in there? I never post anonymously anyway since my karma's high enough to take negative moderation. (The real) Dr_Cheeks
Please ignore the offensive post - it wasn't me. An AC copied my sig - I always post as myself. Thanks for the info.
IANAO(ptician), but I recall that it's down to the distribution (thanks to evolution) of rods and cones (light receptors) on the retina - near the centre there's one sort (can't remember which) that's good for recognising colours and shapes (useful when examining objects), and round the edge there's the other sort that's more sensitive to light/dark and movement (useful for spotting something with big teeth sneaking up on you).
On a normal computer screen we only have to focus on a small part of the image at one time (try reading the text at the top/bottom of this page while staring at the centre). Even on movie screens (which are a comparable size to this screen) we typically only need to look directly at one small part of it at a time and let our peripheral vision pick up the rest. But if this screen is going to be running hi-res images across it's whole surface (i.e. you want to watch the whole thing instead of focusing on one small part) then anyone using it is going to have difficulty seeing the whole image at once, unless they sit really far away or run the thing over and over so you get a chance to see everything.
I could just be talking out of my ass here, so I'd be interested to know if anyone here has used something like this and noticed any problems.
Oh, and before any wise-asses reply - I know my eyes move - I'm talking about trying to see the whole thing at once instead of focusing on different parts in rapid sucession and getting a killer headache.
At Princeton (not Main Campus, but the Plasma Physics Lab) we've got one, too... 7 million pixels, but roughly about half the size (7.5' x 10' or so). We just put in a new screen, and we use 9 Proxima 9250+ projectors attached to a beowulf (yeah!) cluster of 11 dual 733's. Unlike many of the other walls, we do not run custom software... instead, we run WireGL (from Stanford, too lazy to post a link), soon to be upgraded to Chromium (again, look on sourceforge), which just alpha-ed 5 days ago. The uses of this thing are amazing. Visualization is the official use, and it does that amazingly well (our resolution is 3072 x 2304). Things like UT or Quake also kick @$$... in fact, one summer student in our lab is designing a walkthough of the reactor space using UT. But the awesomest part-- tuxracer! Talk about immersive... I've often seen people from tours wince if I accidently fly into a wall at 150 km/hr. It rocks ;)
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The main viewer on the Enterprise bridge.
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
None of the slashdotters really seem to understand why this is cool. The purpose is to render large sets of data as gazillions of pixels all viewable at once. If I had one, I would definitely be rendering fractals on it. (for the totallly clueless, fractals are infinitely complex images created from simple equations.) It would be nothing short of mindblowing to be able to see so many levels of detail at once. Think Mandelbrot set.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Look at the picture half-way down the article.
I'm convinced their 'l33t screen is displaying a quality WinAMP plug-in, adn the guy on the right is saying
"If you look closely you can see the little people, dude!"
... and the one on the left is just awe-struck at the realisation his head is floating in space.
- Wow! Imagine how great it would be to watch pr0n on this thing.
- I need to replace my 19/21/23/50" CRT/LCD/Plasma whatever.
- Imagine a beowolf cluster of these
- Someone give the reasearchers the goatse.cx link.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Actually, if you remember this story, you might be interested to view the 110-million particles simulations in details on such a big display...
But well, they'll have to process very-high-res movies, first, which might be much more expensive in terms of supercomputing power.
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more Slashdotters leavings their houses and going outside...
I'm going to bed... this reality vs nonreality is just too tiring today
You mention that you worry about the possibility of "focusing on different parts in rapid sucession and getting a killer headache." Here's the thing: Your eyes "focus on different parts in rapid succession" all the time when viewing real-world images. That doesn't normally cause killer headaches. (The exception is usually if you're, say, farsighted and insist on looking at a close-up image all day long -- the muscles that focus your eyes spend all day working hard, which like any protracted muscle work get tiring.)
Admittedly, a display like this is probably best when you need to see lots of detail in static images rather than in movies. I think the idea is to be able to visualize lots of spatial detail in extremely complex systems -- to be able to look closely at one part of the image while still maintaining a sense of what's in the periphery. That's hard with current displays, where zooming in means you have to discard stuff outside your immediate field of focus. You're right that if you wanted to watch a moving image, a lot of this resolution would probably be wasted -- in fact, I'm led to believe that some professional flight simulators and similar devices use this fact to their advantage by performing eye-tracking and showing full detail only in the area that the user is actually focused on, while showing lower-resolution imagery in the periphery to save CPU cycles. (Of course, that only works if you have a single or very small number of viewers, all of whose eyes are being tracked.)
One other funny perceptual thing: it's unlikely that "the limitations imposed upon our vision by evolution will become more obvious" when using this or any other display. We cope with those limitations in a very high-resolution environment (the real world) every single day and rarely notice them unless we really take the time to think about them and/or do experiments. We all have a fairly sizable blind spot in each of our eyes, for example (caused because there are no receptors whatsoever where the optic nerve exits the eyeball), and yet we never notice that gaping hole in our field of vision. The combination of unconscious eye movements and the fact that the brain maintains a basically continuous picture of the environment around us do a pretty good job of convincing us that we see everything in the world around us fairly well even when we don't. If anything I suspect what this display will show is how good a job evolution has done at making us ignorant of all the visual limitations we actually have!
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
thanks for the extra time answering me...unfortunately, no slash-dotters seem to care :) perhaps an ask-slashdot is in order...?
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Well, It's about time for me to upgrade my home theater... This time around I wanted a monitor rather than a TV anyway...
I guess all I'd need is to install LiVid. Which would be the most impressive to see, Ronin or Titanic... hmmm. Definately Ronin.
Imagine playing Quake on this bad boy!
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DigiScents has been working on this very thing for years now; I've talked to people who've tested it, and they claim it's damn spooky just how well it works.
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HOT TEENS with incredible resolution! Hotter than you've ever seen before!
No more squinting at tiny Media Player windows!
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Well, if you actually read the article it would have answered your question:
Maybe the lower resolution (40dpi - which i would be surpised in) is not a problem - the fact is this would be usefull when dealing with larger images - youre not standing or sitting right in front of this mother after all - the pixel size would be larger i suspect thus making small detail (such as stars etc ) easier to see - maybe they are looking for field of view rather than super resolution ?
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