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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.'"

16 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. gaming by Apage43 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I have got to play Half-Life on this thing...

    1. Re:gaming by Oliver+Wendell+Jones · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Actually, flight sims on a big screen are very cool, too.

      --
      A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
  2. DPI by Apage43 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  3. Reverse engineering for dummies by LostCluster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Attention Slashdot Editors: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Attention Slashdot Editors: by baxissimo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Fun thing happened to me yesterday. I hit "preview" on a submission I was making to one story and it served me up a page for moderating a completely different story. And I have moderation turned off.

      There's something definitely unusual about our cute little slashcode these days. Could he be experimenting with drugs?

    2. Re:Attention Slashdot Editors: by Stevyn · · Score: 2, Interesting

      This has been driving me nuts for the past few days. Yeah, I'm an addict. I admit the problem. Withdrawal is no fun. All those "so why doesn't slashdot ever get slashdotted" jokes have just proven to be very unfunny.

  5. What's the point? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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

  6. Re:nit picking by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    More than seams what I see is several regoins where there is ghosting, which are probably multiple projector overlap regions. But still that's really good color and luminance matching they've got going there. Way better than what you'll get if you just take a few projectors out of the box and project them up on a wall side-by-side.

  7. Re:That's not a monitor... by jest3r · · Score: 3, Interesting

    why is tiling 4 projectors together newsworthy?

    i can tile 2 projectors together with my matrox dualhead display .. 4 doesn't seem to far fetched or newsworthy really.

    its like that guy who stitched together 190+ pictures from his digital camera and claims he broke the 1 gigapixel barrier ...

    taking pieces of smaller images - whether they be projected or not - and stitching them together into someting bigger has been commonplace on the backs of trading cards for years ..

  8. But does it self-align? by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The question is whether this self-aligns all the projectors. If it does, it's a step forward. If it doesn't, it's Yet Another Mosaic Display With Alignment Headaches.

    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.

  9. or this one ... by pavon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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 :).

  10. Re:National Security is an overused buzzword... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    nope, the government wasteful spending is still the DoD. I work at the Indiana University School of Medicine, which recently received a $10,000,000 grant from the US Army to fund a research center for breast cancer therapy and a $90,000 grant (same link above) from the DoD to study proteins and how they relate to breast cancer.

    Now, breast cancer is a worthy cause for research dollars and all, but shouldn't the National Institutes of Health (NIH) be funding these things? Why is the DoD involved in something like this? If they're going to be supporting medical research, one would think it would be for smallpox or something like that.

    (Obviously posting anon to protect me.)

  11. Versus bad == terrorism / danger to our children by Morgaine · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
  12. This is already being sold for years by den_erpel · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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."
  13. Re:This is not news by mikeage · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Pagz, check below for Marques's (remember him?) comment and my response. Also note that the 12 projector wall is 9 megapixels (4096x2304), and we did have 9MP images, both CG and real. Craig's player was cute but primative... the reason that design was chosen was bandwidth-- if you want 9 megapixel animation at 24bps, you have 27 MBps of raw data... which is quite stressful on the network and the PCI bus.

    --
    -- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?