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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.'"
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.
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
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.
A screen that doesn't allow private viewing for up to a mile away...
... which is still more secure than any unpatched Windows installation.
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...
" ...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!
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.
DiamondVision installations
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.
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
Or a bigger monitor?
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.
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
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
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.
Terrorist! Do you want Al Queda to blow something else up? Are you working for Bin Laden? THEN YOU WILL pay for our gigantic screens which will be used to monitor your safety in the shower!
*gives long congress-like speech on how I'm related to someone who's sister's uncle's room-mate once talked to a guy who died somewhere near the WTC explosion*
Yes that's right, I went there.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
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
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."
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