NASA's Hyperwall 7'x7' LCD display

Doppler00 writes "I thought this was a unique use of off-the-shelf technologies. NASA is using NVidia Geforce 4 video cards, AthlonMP processors, and Red Hat Linux 7.3 to create a super computing system to display 'up to six dimensions'." Press-releasy, but worth reading if you want to imagine the rec room of the future ;)

Comments

Re:Six whole dimensions...

[morcheeba]

According to NASA Ames research scientists, the Hyperwall is extremely adept at displaying a 2D array of 3D images; thereby providing a five dimensional view.
Somehow, I don't think dimensions quite add up that way. Especially because the 2d array reuses 2 of the dimensions used in the 3d view.

What they are doing is drawing slices - the same way you can represent a car in 3D by displaying lots of 2D slices. Since the pictures are disjoint, it's a lot harder to interpret (that's why people are working on fly-throughs for MRI 2D slice data). Here's another article with a picture of the beast. All that power, and they use only 2 colors - argh!!

Not content, these scientists are "currently attempting to provide a tool for interactively exploring the six dimensional electronic pair density function calculated for small molecules."
So, the last dimension is interactivity, which can be considered time.