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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.'"
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.
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
Same thing again, but with twice as many projectors:
http://www.cs.vu. nl/pics/F3_big.jpg
The article sheds no light on this:
Innovative software allows the four separate projections to be blended together so that no seams are seen between adjacent segments, joining the four images into a single picture with higher resolution than regular television sets.
Wow! Higher resolution than regular television sets. Even 800x600 would qualify.
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Well, even from the story you can get some clues. This is aggregating 4 projectors. So I'd say that a hi-end projector being approx 1920x1024, the final resolution must be around 3840x2048, which is more than enough to watch a video - since that's what you're referring to.
Think that the first digital theater projector that TI demoed in france was running at 1280x960 (not sure about the vert. reso.) pixels.
So I guess there's no need to rant over there after all.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
" ...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.
I think its the cookies. When I have this problem, if I delete my slashdot cookies, I can get to slashdot. But if I try to log on ... I get error 503.
After a little while, I can log it.
Also, another problem - sometimes I have to reload the page; because the text is all over the place.
Using latest (stable) Mozilla.
DiamondVision installations
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.
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
I saw someone else mention it, and it worked for me...
Log out. It really seems to help with performance.
Netcraft has so graciously given, for all those 503 errors, please use one of the following:
Also: please copy and paste this post to every other person that has whined about slashdot, and has not donated money or clicked on ads!
I know I am offtopic, but mod me as you wish! Mod up if you want ppl to know these other sites (and possibly slashdot the slashdot), or mod me down if you do not want this information to get out!
Also: I have no information on why the site has been going 503. All I know is from Netcraft
Another pointer towards the cookies is in this bug report and comments
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
One of the main changes was to RSS -- see this comment for details.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
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
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.
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 highly recommend something called 'etherape'. Look it up. What it does is snarf and display all image files seen on a network (via tcpdump or snoop or whatever) completely out of context. No text, descriptions, nothing, just pics scrolling by.
It's a great toy for an overhead projector at an internet cafe, or, who knows, at a demonstration of a 140" monitor on a university network...
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage