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Replace Your Windows With LCD Panels
hoagaboom writes "I had particularly ugly neighbors and a lot of LCD panels laying around, so why not build a
Virtual Window? I really wanted to do full motion video, but PCI bandwidth is standing in my way. So with multiple PCIE vid cards, any suggestions on how to split a full motion video stream in Linux?"
Hook up a webcam and put it right outside.
Seeing as this was slow to load in the mysterious future, here's a coral cache of the link...
Sorry, I already replaced my Windows with Linux.
SCNR
I had particularly ugly neighbors
The neighbor's response: "I had particularly ugly neighbors too"
Free XBox, PS2
This can't be right...TFA contains an article of a (presumably) real, live, breathing girl!
/ducks
What have you done with my Slashdot??
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
After all, you'll be the one having fun jumping through an LCD panel in an emergency.
Of course, the person that originally thought this up knew that, which is why he added fake windows instead of real ones.
I want to see the same concept executed using 30" Apple Cinema displays and have video of birds smashing into the "glass", like you're looking out of a skyscraper window.
-Randy
This reminds me very much of the Bob Shaw story Other Days, Other Eyes where someone invents "Slow Glass". This substance slowed down the passage of light through it (a lot) and there evolved a market for panes of Slow Glass that had been sited near a spectacular view, for instance, and were subsequently installed as people's window panes. The lucky recipient thought s/he was looking out the window onto the original scene.
Given that we don't have Slow Glass readily available, the LCD idea rather appeals...
right now it's probably now very cost friendly for most people. In the future though, I can imagine city dwelling people, maybe someone in New York/L.A. etc, just outright boarding up all the windows. Replace them with an array of LCD's that have a live or recorded image of the beautiful countryside, or mountainous range of colorado.... moving from dusk to dawn, to give the sense of realtime scenery.
I couldn't think of a better escape from the urban nightmare that I live in right now. If it were affordable, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Skype Me! username: john_allen_mohammed
Are there any LCD panels out there that are translucent? That would be the next logical step. Imagine being able to change the brightness of a window by sending certain signals to the LCD. Plus this would produce the natural light everyone needs.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
Now he can have some porn chick neighbors!
At the CEDIA Expo in Indianapolis last week, Sony actually had a booth like this where on the outside they had video screens that looked like Windows into the booth. Don't know what they used, though. I didn't even look close enough to see if they were LCDs or not.
Should also have an eye tracking system to show the images from any angle, which might not be possible since you need a 3D model.. Also, what if more than one person sees through the window?
Certainly an impressive undertaking but somehow it just doesn't sit right. The image depth is what my mind would be questionning. I mean if you don't actually feel like it's really out there then it may as well just be a nice photograph that you've glued over your windowpanes.
This has to be one of the most creative uses of technology I've seen on /. Great job!
Now theres gotta be some really funny/interesting images you could put on those? How about a bunch of people peering in (add some speakers and you could really scare some houseguests)?
Also, does the computer change brightness/images to match the time of day?
I could just imagine the shock of the guy's grandma coming over, looking out the window, and suddenly seeing the Windows BSOD appear in the window.
Most inside cabins in cruise ships have fake windows, i.e. a picture that looks like a window that looks like you're looking at the sea.
So this "invention" might be a good way to relay actual sea views in those cabins.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
This reminds me a lot of Farenheit 451 with the TV's on every wall in the living room. Scary thought...
Are you talking about the LCD's, or the Hot Chick (tm) weilding the soldering iron??? w00t!! ;-)
Never give any object more potential energy than you want it to have.
This post has got to be influenced by the booming LCD market. Come on, unless you have ONE 15" window, there is no freaking way the average joe could afford to plaster say four windows averaging about 50" (in my TINY apt) with LCDs... and why would you want to, why not jus put up tin foil and look all fifties sci-fi like everyone else?!
...and it should be known by now
If you simply have multiple PCIE cards in the same system, X.ORG and Xinerama will allow you to do this by building a 'desktop' of four screens - you can then playback 'fullscreen' video across all four.
The dual-head functionality of some cards could let you get away with just 2 cards as well.
One drawback is that as far as I know, OpenGL is not implemented in Xinerama yet (not such a worry for video tho).
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Who saw this and thought "Now wouldn't this be great for porn?"
A fun side project: Hook these up to a high-end SGI machine, install a digital camcorder to film the real view out your window, and replace your ugly neighbors with attractive digital characters in real time.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Dont burn your house down by rigging this up in a way where 120V power cords are running inside your walls. (I realize the page author does not have this.) If you use 120V wiring inside a wall that is not in an NEC approved manner, and your house burns down, you might be liable.
This includes not being able to have an outlet mounted inside a wall nearby the frame, in a permanently inaccessible location. No, the fact that you can remove drywall to access it does not make it accessible. Now, maybe if the entire frame swung open on recessed hinges to a finished space with a normally mounted outlet, OK. But best ask the inspector.
Many people will say "Ahh but this is low voltage power wiring" so, there isn't much danger. True, for DVI video signalling, but what about powering the backlighting?
But when the voltage is low, the current is high, and the potential is still there to create heat.
For example. You've probably got some big-ass wires carrying 100 amp or 200 amp service into your house. But if you go out to the power pole, you'll see the transformer which feeds your big wires has a extremely tiny wire getting it's power from the overhead lines. At the high voltages of transmission lines, small wires easily carry the small currents. At the low voltages going into your house, big wires carry the larger currents. Whats the same? The amount of power being carried.
So never assume stuffing 12V cords through a wall is safe just because the voltage is so low. How much power is involved?
I ask because mirrors are fairly inexpensive.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I can't wait until this guy gets really creative and creates some "alternative" landscapes for the windows, such as:
:(
Space (orbiting planets, floating in space, flying through space)
Hell
Underwater
Psychadelic
Riots
Sea
Wild West
damn, I ran out of ideas quicky
If you don't have any luck getting a single video playing on a multi-screen Xinerama display, you could use mplayer's crop function to play the relevant parts of the same video on each display, using separate instances of mplayer.
'man mplayer' has plenty of details, just search for 'crop'. The tricky part will be making all of them start at exactly the same time :-)
Who are you and how can I have your life?
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
15" LCD monitors (8x$275.95) - $2207.60
Nvidia Quadro4 PCI video cards (2x$102.00) - $204.00
Windows frames (2x$500?) - $1000.00
Decent computer - $1500.00
Misc. Parts(wires, brackets, etc) - $250.00
Grand estimated total - $5161.60
...and this is probably a low estimate.
Sheesh!! If I have some extra cash I can afford the "good" beer and only hope the view from my window looks better.... must be nice
I wish this technology was consumer and commonplace. Then you could wardrive someone's network and goatse all their LCD windows...
Click here for a free picture of an iPod!
- Author of this story = Hoagaboom
:)
:)
- Hoagaboom's slashdot ID link leads to www.hoagy.org
- whois on www.hoagy.org leads to:
Ryan Hoagland
1 Infinite loop
Cupertino, CA 95014 US
- Map quest verifies this address is real
- Terraserver verifys what appears to be a corporate plaza
- A Google search on this address reveals that this is "Apple Corporate Headquarters"
- Crap. Dead end. Hoagaboom is a liar.
My goal was to find out where he lived, systematically pinpoint his neighbors residence, obtain their contact information, then notify them by phone that their neighbor Ryan thinks they are ugly, then post the recorded phone conversation for you all to listen to. Oh well. I tried.
I dunno about you, but one of the main uses of my windows back at home is allowing the air to come in (and out) of my house.
I think that the perfect setup would be a LCD window, that can be opened (just as a regular one), and that can made translucent, ranging from a standard glass' window to a full opaque (like the virtual one presented here).
Just a side (OT) note, anyone else noticed that he masked his email address to avoid spam, leaving the mailto: target untouched?!?
--krahd
mod me up scottie!
this reminds me of the old VCR tapes, the ones you could get that were just of burning logs, or of a fish aquairum; it would look like you had something you didn't. of course back then the tech wasn't nearly what it was today, so a window of a strange outdoor scene could produce the needed 'wow' factor that previously was unattainable.
CBLJKSDF
free ipod and free gmail!
I was playing with VideoLAN a week ago, and noticed it has a video filter module called "wall" (this is under WinXP, FWIW) which will split your stream into as many multiple windows as your machine can handle. So, split your video stream into four windows, move each one to its own display, and full-screen them. I haven't played with VLC under Linux, but I'm guessing it has the same options.
Great project, BTW! I've been thinking of doing something like this for a while. Good luck!
Apply for a patent! You could sell tons of these things! Your target market would be the people who use weather applets (or web pages) to see what the weather is like, rather than GOING/LOOKING OUTSIDE.
After all, there are plenty of people with more money than sense.
Super cool hardware hack, though...
Hear ye, Hear ye!
Finally grand dream of the geek comes true. Possblity of the total isolation from the outside world (those pesky sun rays, other people who might actually want to talk to you in person)and its still done in high tech manner with no need to use primitive bricks and mortar.
And wait there is more: You can display your favourite games landscape complete with purple skies and those horny female aliens.
Now *this* IMO is what Slashdot, News for Nerds is all about!
As there is no depth perception, the only practical benefit of this set-up over a photo pasted on the window is that you can change the picture more easily (recall that he can't use it for FMV). But that's not the point. It has immense geek karma, if there is such a thing.
Good for him.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Boy, Julie was sorry to have said that she wanted to help solder. [snip: picture of girl soldering]
/.ers that they really do have a girlfriend.
It's quite amazing the length geeks will go to in order to prove to other
Distributed Multihead X Project
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Simply configure your X server for a multihead configuration -- Ie something like this (this is from my xorg.conf):
Of course you'd have many more Screens, but that's easy. Then in your "ServerFlags" section, simply turn Xinerama on:
And there you go... now next time your run mplayer what you'll have to do is mplayer -fs -screenw [xres] -screenh [yres].
The reason for this is mplayer will default to going fullscreen on one of the heads, but if you explicitly give it geometry it'll do what you want.
There is one other minor problem I found when testing this out... mplayer appears to have a check built in that gives max resolution as 4096x4096. Since you said on your page that the total desktop resolution was only 3072x2048 it seems that'll work fine!
Even if you do go for higher res, you might be able to simply go through the mplayer code and comment out that check? (or who knows it could actually be there for a reason!?) You might also be able to send a message to the developers. I can't see anyone not wanting to help out a project this cool!
Best of luck!
You're gonna be the next Mike Rowe Soft.
the video-whale project [gstreamer.freedesktop.org]
The company I work for recently had the theft of 8 15 inch LCD monitors. If you have any information regarding this crime that leads to an arrest, we shall reward you $1000 dollars.
While not an active display, some posters are talking about electrochromic windows, which can be LCDs (though usually not). They are pretty expensive, easily $2,000+ each. I've been wanting them for my living room/home theater, but can't quite justify the $20k investment in windows for my $1,000 projector...
Some swankier clubs have them for bathroom doors which go from translucent (cloudy white) to transparent, as opposed to the 98%/0% transmissive black ones.
Just google for electrochromic.
he would have something besides a sunset.Well maybe a sunset, but not one from Earth!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Grandpa: (with stake and mallet) We have to kill the boy!
Lisa: How did you know that Barts a vampire?
Grandpa: He's a vampire?! (drops stake/mallet) AHHHHH (runs away)
(later)
Lisa: You must drive this stake through his heart.
Homer: DIE YOU INHUMAN MONSTER!!!! (pounds stake into Burns)
Lisa: Uh, dad that's his crotch.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
My parents have an LCD window in their bathroom. Flip a switch and it goes in a blink of an eye from frosted to clear.
That was put in there five years ago, and I think its pretty common in high end homes these days.
Just look this pic
Fake windows with a fake view, next to a FAKE PLANT.
When I see these things, I feel so lucky to live in Finland, surrounded by thousands of acres of forests and lakes, where I can easily meet with all sorts of wild animals doing what they do. Reminds you that there's some real life in this world still. Who knows how many natural resources were destroyed to make those LEDs and the electric and computing power to make it all work. The real thing is cheaper and looks better.
Sigged!
perhaps I could possibly afford an LCD porthole.
the telescope pointing at the fake windows was a really nice touch.
Slightly off-topic, but the (partially assembled) LCD display under Step 1 is either an Apple Cinema Display or an Apple Studio Display. (With a transparent case -- to my knowledge, apple never made any monitors with a completely transparent bezel)
:-)
Interesting -- a possible source of his LCD Panels
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
This is very cool. Along the lines of Gibson's changing suit. Now, if I had one the size of a closet mirror, I could make my wife feel better about her self!
I just found out that LCDs are capable of burn-in (the hard way). If you plan on displaying a static image on the window for long periods of time, you might want to blank the screen every so often.
You can get 2 ReelTime-4 MPEG2 decoder cards in your PC and get 8 channels of video at a time. These cards are made by Visual Circuits http://www.visualcircuits.com/ and they are pretty good, I used them myself. That would solve your problem of having full motion video on 8 screens. Drivers are made only for Win 2K which is donwside, but overall it is very good product if you only need video streaming.
My uncle was a vampire. Noone believed me until I drove a wooden stake through his heart. It killed him.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips