Slashdot Mirror
140" Monitor Demonstration At Purdue
michaelpapet.com writes "Edward J. Delp, a researcher at Purdue University is working with Philips to make a monster 140" monitor using 4 projectors on a single screen. Article claims it would be good for National Security... I dunno, I see this being the only way to satisfy 'big screen envy.'"
Life size P0rn, here I COME!!!
wait, that didn't sound right.
I have got to play Half-Life on this thing...
It's a projection screen. You could always make those as big as you want based on pure optics.
However, that's not the tech advance anyway. What they're really showing off is the way to get multiple projectors to work together so that you end up with four times the projection area and also four times the resolution while using relatively off-the-shelf projectors, and avoiding the seam effect that would happen if you tried to do this yourself.
"The new displays could be used for future "digital cinema," in which films are stored entirely on a computer's hard drive and then projected onto a large screen for audiences."
Lets just hope it won't run windows. I would hate for it to bluescreen halfway through my movie.
"I see this being the only way to satisfy 'big screen envy.'"
Until they demonstrate the 160" model...
Okay, it's a BIG projection screen, but, what kinda DPI does it get?
I've seen these things that 'Make a big-screen dvd player', that are simply a lens you put over a portable dvd player's LCD screen, which doesn't have high enough DPI to account for such a big screen. is it extra blocky or is it at like 1200000x102400000 resolution? (And if so how many FPS can it get on... say, anything?
This tech is only being billed for a national security use because that's where the government wasteful spending is these days. If everybody was concerned about hurricanes for some strange reason, then this tech would be sold for its weather uses.
This monitor can only display a super-high-res security camera image if a super-high-res camera was installed too... and that resolution on a map would be wasted if they don't have a different datapoint for each pixel. I'm putting this one under "cool tech without any real use".
"I'm gonna get one of my own real soon.
;-).
It's like
having a drive-in movie
in your own living room."
I couldn't resist
(Weird Al reference)
Imagine The Blue Screen of Death on that! Scary...
Simpy
Check out Panoram Technologies for established systems. I'm pretty sure they cater to military applications.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
just to be a bit of a bitch here... can anyone else see the seams these four projectors cause? because i sure as hell can.
Multi-projector, seemless projection is standard equipment in scientific visualization labs. What's special about this one?
Take four projectors and divide the desktop amongst them while feathering the edges.
Quick, patent that bad boy before Microsoft beats you to it!
Article claims it would be good for National Security... I dunno
What you fail to realize is that it's spelled "National Security", but it's pronounced "GRANT FUNDING".
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Same thing again, but with twice as many projectors:
http://www.cs.vu. nl/pics/F3_big.jpg
This particular display also includes a computer, which runs an algorithm that gets rid of overlapping regions between adjacent projections, eliminating the seams in the process.
There you go. Take four projectors and let them overlap a little. Then, you pixel-row by row eliminate the overlaps by not moving the projectors, but simply feeding the projector black lines in the places where you don't want it to do any work. When you've assured that there's no point on the screen being served by two projectors, you've also lowered the seam area to less than the width of a pixel on the screen.
We, the loyal readers of Slashdot, know that there is a problem with Slashdot. Lately, we have been receiving tons of 503 and 500 errors (and "Nothing to see here", as well). Slashdot has also been extremely slow during this time on many occasions. We demand to know what is going on. What is wrong? What is being done to fix it? Or are you just going to bitchslap this thread and try to hide the problem (security through obscurity)? We aren't unreasonable; we just want to know the truth. I think we deserve it.
Thank you.
I just realized some potential usage for this. This is sorta like a projector version of NASA's Mission Control screen. Could they be invisioning a portable SAC "mobile base" in case the country is attacked and Camp David was not secure?
got sig?
...about a foot above the presenter's arm. Is that the projectors "no-seam" seam or is it just an imperfect image?
Current high-end projectors can already output 1920x1080p (P is for progressive as opposed to interlaced) and they achieve this resolution using normal TV (480i) or DVD (480p) or even HDTV resolutions(1080i or 720p) by using scalars. Unless you plan to run a really large desktop for computer-type material such as video camera monitors or any applications, this is useless because all source material is better viewed via a scalar into a very large projector. In the past, CRT projectors used to be stacked to get more light output for larger screens. Basically is was two projectors hitting the same screen with the same image so only light output would go up. These setups were tricky but have been used for decades. Th
Why would that waste money on such money while they can spend funds on building a high speed agile space shuttle so that whoever is interested in Homeland Security can jump onto one of these ships, and look at any surface on earth.
If they need a bigger area, just steer the ship toward the space a little, if they want a close-up, just descend as needed.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
And if you are not old enough to recognize that, and do not even know who Lowell Thomas was, take a look at this site.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Get a dual-head videocard, IE Matrox or ATI to name a few, and hook up two XGA 4/3 projectors up to it. Line up carefully, and you can watch an anamorphic 2.35:1 dvd @ 1805x768 with black bars on the SIDES instead of the top. Pretty sweet.
Doesn't seem hard to do four this way. Their setup is rear projection, which is a bit harder of course. And the article says it's running near 16/9 aspect.
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
A screen that doesn't allow private viewing for up to a mile away...
... which is still more secure than any unpatched Windows installation.
Good for nat'l security?!? You mean like a really big screen where they can tell us everything is fine and that we will blind the terrorists with their own confusion?
Just one question, is the chick with the hammer seeing anoyne?
And I just spend all this money on Apples' 30" HD Cinema Display!
It's not a corp, its a university...
We need to appoint a Large Display Czar! This will be a single contact in the government where the president can go to quickly get up to speed on Large Displays over 120" in size.
Ya ! Everything that sell at high cost is good for national security !
Remember after 9/11 ! The motto was : Buy! Buy! Buy!
I was referring to Philips (which I actually think is a European company)
got sig?
Maybe they could have left it up a few more days? We might need it pretty soon
this sig deleted by another sig
And since current desktops are not vector based, desktop icons are ridiculously minuscules and increasing the fonts up to 1000% causes text to fail fitting within the widgets boundaries.
I want a fully vector based desktop, on Linux, and I want it adopted by the major distributions as the default. I know that their are some vector based desktop, but they are not usefull since they are not widely deployed and apps are not coded for them.
I want to be able to program and specify that Widget B is 70% the size of Widget a, and the window is by default 12 cm wide or 50% of the width of the desktop (user configurable).
I hate specifying in pixels. They are not the same on different display devices.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
This is just one GIANT penis size competition.
:p
Couldn't they just have used some of that generic viagra and saved a load of cash
" ...joining the four images into a single picture with higher resolution than regular television sets. "
DUH!! My 17" monitor already has a higher resolution than my tv-set!
Privacy is terrorism.
Doom 3 comes out, 140" monitor demo.. /me changes his pants. Repeatedly.
Don't call me a cowboy, and don't tell me to slow down!
you can buy these on ebay for eight bucks.
Oh wait...
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
Self-alignment is quite feasible today, because you can get multi-megapixel cameras. Or you could aim a cheap webcam at each join point. Somehow you've got to get high-resolution images of the join points. Then alignment is a straightforward process, if you get to project test patterns.
For a production product, it would make sense to put a cheap camera in each projector, looking at the screen. Doesn't even have to be color. Some CRT-based projectors have this now, for auto-convergence. Then you could just aim a few projectors at the screen, get them roughly aligned, and let the software do the setup. This could even work for LAN parties.
I got about 1/3 through the article but I had to open the door cause it was gettin too thick in here. I wonder if the projectors they use are going to be near as good as this one.
DiamondVision installations
I mean, how else are you going to project big brother's image?
at sandia labs with 4x the projectors. I don't think they have a cool algorithm for the seam matching, like the one in the story though. The neat thing about the sandia one system was what was feeding it - a 64 node cluster that could render realtime 3d visualizations of simulations done on the ASCI super computers. I don't know what the polygon count was on that thing but each projector was 1280x1024 and I couldn't see any corners when looking at a very detailed model (the one shown in the press release actually :).
I'd hardly call this "innovative" or even label it as a "technology." It's a standard multi-image slide show trick that probably goes back at least to the 1960s. (It was old hat when I did it in 1989.) It has been done with movie projection and is routinely done with video projection (see Dataton WatchOut).
The trick is to have some overlap between the projection areas, and to use complementary gradient filters at the overlapping edges. The gradient filters can hide seams that even the slightest misalignment would cause.
There was a graduate student (at CMU?) who made a nifty program that could compensate for alignment problems. The projectors could be crudely aligned, then grids were displayed on each one. A PC cam captured the grids, computed the offset, tilt, and keystoning. From that information a reverse transform was applied to each projector's output, and you got a remarkably well aligned multi-projector image. Very impressive, since the cam was obviously much lower in resolution than the composite image.
Multi-projector techniques are even more important with video than they were with slides, since the light output of video projectors is so much lower. To throw a big image, combining multiple projectors is the most practical option.
I hate to rain on your parade but Thomson is mostly a French company, actually used to be owned (at least partly) by the French government.
As a side note, the actual article says they are working with Thomson but the slashdot summary says Philips (another European company, from the Netherlands).
Underloved Movies and Pub Quiz: donotquestionme.org
The technique is fast and the results are impressive.
6.7 feet high still seems inadequate for several Doom3 monsters.
who read that headline as 14" Monitor Demo? I read that and thought, "Big Deal - I have a couple of those crappy things sitting unused on a shelf in the garage". Heck, these probably wouldn't even fit in my garage with all the other junk in there...
Guess I need new glasses.
"Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing - and it was everything that I thought it could be."
Since this rig theoretically has guerrilla drive-in applications, has a squad of MPAA lawyers armed with cease-and-desists been air-dropped over Purdue yet?
...even if it does make me sterile.
But the question is, how well will Doom 3 look on it?
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
There's a rumour going around that it happenns on the hour due to RSS aggregators. It does seem to be worse for me on the hour, but that could perhaps be attributed everyone arriving at work / coming back from lunch etc on the hour...
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
This setup is cool, however a less covered display is Purdue's 24 projector stereoscopic tiled display wall that i spent a year designing and building through the Envision Center at Purdue. This was built from 24 projectors in 12 tiles, with a custom designed and built frame. There was no software used to align the projectors, just me and an alignment system aligning everything by hand. There are a lot of universities and centers building tiled displays, it is much harder to try and build one in stereo(two projectors per tile, one projector for each eye. This is coupled with polarizations filters and glasses so that the right eye only gets the 12 right eye projectors, and the left eye gets the 12 let eye projectors. The stereoscopic settings are controlled with the software and the quad buffer stereo built into nvidia graphics cards.) -Jim Bartek bartek@purdue.edu
Can't fit the downloaded photo on my monitor... oh, the irony!
They had a display that was about 40 feet by 10 feet. And it was super high res.
This article is pointless.
I'm glad my alma matter is hard at work solving the world's most pressing issues.
You obviously know nothing about security. Everyone knows that terrorists will never attack us once they see our great, big ... computer displays.
That would make for a killer game of minesweeper!
I guess I'll have to play life-sized doom3 in the garage...
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
I goto Purdue and they already have 12 projectors working together, not sure why this is so special. They arn't used in such large display as their purpose is resolution, but as some already pointed out thats just basic optics limiting.
The blue screen of death is four times bigger, or is that life size??
One of the main changes was to RSS -- see this comment for details.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room! ...unless it's a DOOM 3 deathmatch you're talking about, of course.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Right now, I'm working on an industrial meeting where the screen is 16' x 100', 4799 x 768 pixel resolution, using WATCHOUT (www.dataton.com) and off-the-shelf Christie projectors... The screen size, as noted elsewhere can be arbitrarily wide/high.
Chromakey == bluescreen; If you were to have even read the wikipedia articles you linked to, you would know that.
TeleSuite already has a 4 screen monitor / display unit, 2048 by 480 pixels, and 16 by 3 feet, as part of the 400 series tele-immersion system. This uses NTT projectors and a one throw back-projection system.
Standard use includes 4 scalars to make the display overlap seamlessly and IP multicast transport using multiple video groups.
It's not built for national security, but it does do a good job with telepresence.
I'm a little late to this thread but this is definately not news...two years ago I was working for PPPL (www.pppl.gov) and we had 12 projectors tiled together to form one large display. Princeton U. main campus had 24 I believe. I've also worked on the Rutgers U. Engineering has one that tiles 9 together.
:-)
Here's how it works. The RU and the PPPL walls were powered by a linux cluster, one machine per projector with a high end graphics card in it (Yes I played Unreal Tournament on it...it was damn nice). How does Unreal work on it? At the time we were using a project called WireGL which intercepts OpenGL calls on the master machine (or whatever machine is running the program) then splits them up across the Myrinet network to the machine that will render the image on it's section of projector. This project was run out of Standford while the new version of the project is called Chromium is now located out of UVA. This projects also not only split up the image but allow for pixal overlap so that the image appears "seamless".
Yes I've also seen parts of the Matrix on the PPPL wall as a coworkers project was to write a parrallel MPG player for use on the wall, as this was a summer fellowship project he did not have much time to complete it and took a basic approach to it which was preprocess the mpg to split it into the configuration then using a modified mplayer I believe it was added networking code to syncronize the images, sound was not completed during the summer.
Princeton U's cluster was a windows cluster which needed custom video drivers to power their wall but otherwise it was the same principal (when I left Princeton U was supposed to be moving the cluster over to linux).
From skimming the questions in this thread I believe I've answer all but the DPI question...and that ends up being you do not have a pixalated display, infact at PPPL before we scaled up to 12 projects (the number of them when I left there atleast) the wall was a 7 Megapixal display and we found images taken with a 7 megapixal camara...they look simple stunning, in one image you were able to see finishing nails driven into a table cloth to keep it down.
Anyway I hope that answers everyone's technical questions.
Cheers
This tech is only being billed for a national security use because that's where the government wasteful spending is these days. If everybody was concerned about hurricanes for some strange reason, then this tech would be sold for its weather uses.
Indeed, but once you understand that, you might as well buy into the system. Politicians aren't sentient as such, they just twitch occasionally under particular triggers, and National Security is of course a key positive trigger.
While one's at it, one might as well label one's competition as encouraging terrorism and creating a danger to our children. That's bound to trigger a helpful negative response. Logic doesn't come into the process at all.
This is where geeks go wrong, in expecting that the rest of society uses the same rational mechanism of thought as they. If one starts with that misconception, it's no wonder that the world appears incomprehensible.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
What, no DLP cinemas in NW indiana?
Or are the guys just lonesome for some Cinerama seam lines in their pictures?
Someone here at the University of Kentucky has been doing the same sort of thing (and them some) for at least 5 years now. Including blending large numbers of projected screens through a distributed framebuffer (in linux, using cameras for auto-calibration), imposing projected images overtop one another for shadow removal, resolution enhancment and other various and sundry things.
See http://www.metaverse.org for technical details and contacts.
John Soward...University of Kentucky
The real problem isn't so much the dreadful quality of service owing to the 500's and 503's --- after all, most of us aren't paying for high availability.
What really hurts is that our "friends" are behaving like corporate louts who are too big for their britches, and are not being open to us about the problem.
The community is good at helping. Let us.
Hell, I've got an old NEC CRT projector out in my garage (you know, the ones with three seperate lenses). It can be adjusted to go anywhere from a 60" screen to a 300" screen. Its 1280x1024, so I'm sure at a 300" screen that would be shitty dpi...but still, this really isn't shocking news.
And I don't see what it has to do with fucking national security, I guess thats the latest excuse to get massive amounts of government money to buy projectors.
Offtopic.
Who didn't see this coming, anyway? Every game gets pirated. Popular games get pirated more than games nobody wants. Since when is this news?
Hell, not even all those downloads are lost sales or cheapskates who wouldn't have bought it anyways. Some of us just want the game a couple of days sooner and will buy it a soon as we're able to. Although at the rate I'm downloading it, waiting until Gamestop has it will probably be faster... Stupid leechers uploading at 0.5k/s...
if you read the article they note that this is the first such projector to make that there are no seams between projection screens.
Photos.
...as a friend of mine did with a 7" tv to get a 100" projection. for $20 worth of materials and 7" tv... that was one hell of a screen (flip tv upside down, attach make-shift magnifying glass, turn off the lights and vuala 100" TV), the quality was pretty good too, although a bit lacking in brightness. These self-made projection screens go pretty cheap on ebay... no recessionary budgeting needed.
Downloaded it. AND pre-ordered it. easy enough.
Not a sentence!
If you want to play Doom 3, and if the resolution is what people make it out to be, you'd need a flame-spitting video card of death (with racing stripes, N2O and neon lights of course) to get that kind of draw rate.....
*punchline*Doom 3 by Email, anyone?*/punchline*
And I've never heard of a 4-head video card. Perhaps you could strap two dual-display, overclocked-above-melting-point-of-tungsten Matroxes and use the Alienware proprietary card combiner thing to get results.
We are officialy one Big Step Closer to those hellish, giant video screens in Minority Report (slow OLED display technology growth allowing). I imagine a 140 inch screen will turn some 3D artists' heads, because when I work in 3Ds max I always wish the screen was bigger so I wouldn't have to squint my eyes/zoom in extensively.
I want a fully vector based desktop, on Linux, and I want it adopted by the major distributions as the default. I know that their are some vector based desktop, but they are not usefull since they are not widely deployed and apps are not coded for them.
Get a Mac. Honestly. Get a Mac. It's BSD based, and Quartz uses Display PDF. It's everything you want, and it's available now. Either that, or track yourself down a copy of NextStep that used Display Postscript.
I love this qoute:
"From the cinema quality visuals and the incredible 5.1 sound, to the terrifying atmosphere and hyper-realistic environments, the whole game screams 'interactive horror film'.
Yeah, sure, if it happens to be a horror film with no plot and boring gameplay. well, you know what I mean...
come to fork in path, go left, kill zombies, come to locked door, backtrack, go down right path, kill zombiez, get key, backtrack, go through door. repeat. until. bored.
The graphics are only cool for like a half hour and then you start to think damn this thing runs like shit and why is it so fucking dark and why does the gameplay suck so bad?
I'll spend my money on half-life 2.
Article claims it would be good for National Security...
I'm pretty sure that however much a 12-foot monitor costs, the money could be much better spent on funding homeland security efforts in our cities.
Not that anyone would expect them to, but they fail to mention that this system tested earlier this year at JavaOne.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Seen that this is only 4 so what.
In a place where you cannot get big screens a guy using linux linked 16 standard monitors together to come up with one verry large screen. It points out is house or goes to sporting events.
His require the screen to be take appear and placed in a frame this is simpler but It would lose on res I guess.
THAT'S NOT WHAT THE TECHNOLOGY DEMO IS FOR. They're running the demo for the US Department of Homeland Security. The Homeland Security people aren't interested in the fact that they can align the displays. They're interested in the fact that they're doing it using encrypted scalable imaging.
The fact that they have a bunch of calibrated displays is not interesting. The fact that they're using CKMSS and encrypted video is interesting.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
I have a contract with these guys and I am building software that can... :)
oh, wait, I can disclose it
You can't handle the truth.
PPPL's display wall is 15 feet across, with 9 1024x768 projectors. More pictures and info are available in Mike Age's PPPL Display Wall presentation.
Marques Johansson
"Got a flat-screen monitor, 140" wide,
I believe that yours says "Etch-a-Sketch" on the side."
(Another "Weird Al" reference)
then ask yourself: what are the minimum doom 3 system requirements?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I have seen such screens on a daily basis, I do not see what is so interesting about this "research"... This is just a new player trying to play catchup, that's all...
If you go to the site, you can even see some existing installations (network video and all).
Nothing to see, move along...
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
...When I get a monitor like that - I can't wait to see the detail on my por... I mean uhhh... I can't wait to see the detail of the serifs on my fonts. The possibilities are endless!
Actually, I don't think I'd ever pull up someone's picture on a monitor like that. Who wants to see high-resolution pimples?
Anyone else at Purdue know where they've got this set up? I wouldn't mind "getting lost" and finding my way into there before the rush of undergrads back to campus.
The article says that they're working with Thomson, not Philips as stated in the article summary.
Here in Indianapolis, we hold Purdue in high regard. In fact, we provide directions to those trying to find Purdue thusly:
"Go North until you smell it, then West until you step in it."
I'm going to Rawls Hall tomorrow afternoon and having a look myself :)
I hate specifying in pixels. They are not the same on different display devices.
Using cm isn't a perfect solution, either. I had told X that my second head (my TV) was 32". Well-written apps went ahead and scaled properly to render 12 point text to be 12 points high, which I could not hope to read from my couch. I ended up telling X that I have a 15.5 cm wide display, which is the size of a monitor of the same viewing arc at arm's length.
Sure, it's only a problem in unusual cases-- such as the display in the article, HMDs, etc. But maybe specifying sizes in radians would be more appropriate, if you want consistency.
After some research I have found that the giant map on the screen is of Rome. more precisly it is of the St Peters Basilica.
Sig 404
...I wonder what the MPAA things of something like this? Better not play your DVD's on the computer driving the display, or they're gonna come knockin'!
"where's my 2 dollars?"
the article actually says working with Thomson (largely French government owned)
Gen. Buck Turgidson: Ahh, am I to understand the Russian Ambassador is to be admitted entrance to the War Room?
...all 140 inches of it.
President Muffley: That is correct. He is here on my orders.
Turgidson: I... I don't know exactly how to put this, sir, but are you aware of what a serious breach of security that would be? I mean... begins closing his notebooks he'll see everything. He'll see the big board!
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
These people in the picture are pointing to the capitol or something! Arrest them! They must be terrorists!
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Sorry--meant to say Driftnet. EtherApe is something completely different altogether (although still pretty spiffy.)
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
If this is demo for Homeland Security in the United States, why do they appear to be looking at an aerial photo of St. Peters Square in Rome ? (it looks like it towards the right of the photo - the city is European by the look of it)
This is the WAR ROOM, You can't fight in here!
Reality is all that stuff that doesn't care if you believe in it or not.--Solomon Short
Why would the national security people want to monitor Vatican City! Strange demo image
Homme petit d'homme petit, s'attend, n'avale
By putting one in every town with an image of our leader telling us what to do?
But really how much of a help in national security it is. It would be just stupid to say if only in 2001 we had a 140" high res display then 9/11 wouldn't happen. Besides the way they show the screen on the picture they can only see the lower end of it. Thus wasting the need for high res in the rest of the screen. Is there going to be a platform that can make you travel to the screen. This is just a waist of my money and it is just there to make the office look really cool. And when the reporters leave they turn off the image of the city (which you can't track individuals with) and pop in a DVD or They wanted the 1337est game of DOOM 3 Ever.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I've wondered for a while whether it might be possible to actually overlay four projectors. Rather than an overlapping mosaic of four images, you'd aim all four projectors at the same spot and align them such that each projector filled the gaps between the others' pixels.
So rather than:
AABB
AABB
CCDD
CCDD
you'd have
ABAB
CDCD
ABAB
CDCD
I'd think that this might be more difficult than a simple overlapping mosaic, because you'd have to have consistent geometry across the entire image (rather than just perfectly consistent along the seams).
But it might also nicely hide color balance issues. As all four projectors would simultaneously contribute to any single region of the screen, slight differences in color or brightness would be averaged out by the eye. Maybe. At least, it should be less noticable than if one entire quadrant were, say, "a little red".
I agree. This is why I mentionned "and the window is by default 12 cm wide or 50% of the width of the desktop (user configurable)." Let the user configure the size of the application and save it. What is important is that once the apps has the right dimensions, it renders beautifully.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
No, this is like four engineers lining their dicks up and claiming they've got a 20" penis. If it wasn't for the government funding implications, it'd be referred to as a circle jerk.
Imagine if you could do this with four XGA projectors! Why, you have a nearly unheard of resolution. IF you could use 16 high-output XGA projectors and double each one up to increase the overall brigtness, you might even end up with a 7000 lumen 2048x1536 monster!
t ml?atype=release&releaseID=494
Except, um, it already exists:
http://www.jvcpro.co.uk/tech/dila/news/releases_h
And you don't have to burn 16 lamps at a time and run a high speed computer with special software to do it. Damn, and I was sure this was revolutionize the world.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
That one DM is going vector based, the one named after a little person? Leprachan or sumthing?
...
Then write it like everyone else does in the OSS community?
As soon as you're able to afford one of these monsters, the guy next door will already have two!
The Denver Museum of Science has a 11-projector 57-foot screen planetarium. It is driven by a 30-node Onyx 3800. Most of the time it shows pre-rendered movies of solar system and galactic flybys. However it has a nifty interactive planetarium mode too.
That is a picture of Vatican City, it looks like we are in imminent national danger from the Papists! Orange Alert! (William of Orange...?)
--- I got news, you never gotta go. - Ted Nugent
First the giant drum, now the giant monitor.
Remember that Slashdot just recently updated their code (this was like a few weeks ago) and they mentioned that there would be some serious bug issues for a bit.
This is not how Real Companies handle code updates.
Granted, any rollout of new code is going to turn up some minor issues that were not well anticipated and need to be patched up as they're discovered. But a flaw that makes the site 100% unresponsive on a regular basis is not one of those. (And no, I don't believe it can be pinned on lazy RSS readers flooding the site at the top of every hour. The patterns I've experienced aren't consistent with that.)
The proper way to handle this would be to roll back Slashdot to the previous, stable version of the code until the performance issues can be identified, corrected, and re-tested.
Can't roll the site back non-destructively? Well, that'd be another flaw with the code as well.
for what its worth, the AC setup was also insane for the conference, a huge room of supercomputers, and everyone comfortable.. thats tricky.
Storm
With a 140" screen, all those PHBs who set their screen res at 640x480 may be able to upgrade to 800x600.. or maybe even 1024x768 without straining their eyes too much...
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
Mass hypnosis, seizure delivery, broadcast of AYBABTU transmissions... it's more of a hazard to national security than a help.