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

In related news.

[Neck_of_the_Woods]

We have contracted out the services of Libert to supply us with a 20 unit array of Air Condition Units to keep this "HyberWall" HyperCool. After completion we found the cooling of this monstrosity was more than the wall itself.

To quote the last words of the Project Head "Hey where do we plug this in at?".

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.