Slashdot Mirror
100 Million Pixels of Virtual Reality
Roland Piquepaille writes "It's ironic that Iowa State University (ISU) announced a big upgrade of its C6 virtual reality (VR) room the same day as SGI filed for bankruptcy. Back in 2000, this 10x10x10 foot room was powered by SGI Onyx2 computers. The new version of this six-sided VR room will use 96 graphics processing units from Hewlett-Packard. And with its 24 Sony digital projectors, the researchers at ISU will immerse themselves into images of about 100 million pixels in the most realistic VR room in the world. Of course, this upgrade is not cheap. But with this $4 million addition, this new C6 should lead to new advances in urban planning, genetics, engineering or unmanned aerial vehicles."
(insert obligatory pr0n reference here)!
100 million pixels of virtual pr0n... nope, no way to hide that at work!
stuff |
Is that their slang for VR porn?
There has got to be cheap way to do this at home. I remember seeing Quake 3 on like 24 monitors, if you used projectors you should be able to do this cheaply and maybe better...
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
Can I get some play time of World of Warcraft in there?
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
A HUD for pretending to walk around town. No more reaching into the pocket to see what's playing. And the 21st century was such a letdown until now...
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
The first thing I thought of was how much fun it would be to play Battlefield 2 in this room... Mind you of the million of other actually useful purposes it has. Like pr0n.
Wait...
"That's no moon!"
John
But according to Slashdot VR is useless hype.
Irony is more like rain on your wedding day. Or maybe getting a free ride after you already paid. That kind of stuff.
At least ISU is spending somewhat wisely,but I have heard of some really stupid purchases. Such as spending 3k for Graphics design computers for use as word processors. And you wonder why tuition is rising and extreme rates..
There is nothing this room can do that a decent set of VR goggles can achieve.
The goggles would also have the benefit of being runnable on relatively standand class hardware.
I mean, this thing has to produce a spherical projection for every single point in the viewers space, its got to be crunching far too much data.
I personally don't see the benefits of this virtual magic carpet ride for the outlay required.
liqbase
Let the porn jokes cue in...
ISU is home to the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, the first electronic digital computer.
All the previous posts are lame as hell. I shouldn't add another one, but I have to point out the misuse of the word "ironic". Somebody seems to think that "ironic" means "sad coincidence". No, it means "incongruous circumstances". (There's actually several meanings of "ironic", but this is the one that comes closest to applying.) There's nothing incongruous about this. SGI went bankrupt because their specialized hardware got replaced by commodity hardware. The new VR room uses commodity hardware. No irony here, move along.
Does it really cost that much with todays processing power?
Does Hewlett-Packard actually make GPUs? I would think they would go with some off the shelf chips from Nvidia or ATI, surely those can push more pixels than anything else and they would have the advantage of a relatively standard API (opengl for example).
Is there some very specialised requirement I'm not seeing here?
Search first, ask questions later.
Can it play Mario Clash?
It's like rain on your wedding day.
Would be cool if they coupled this with some sort of video camera that has the capability to capture the images this room is capable of displaying like http://www.realitylens.net/.
For 100 million pixels, the graphics of those planes look pretty crap.
SGI went bankrupt...
It's like the University could have gotten a free ride, but they already paid...
Sony ha
HP makes graphics workstations, and a lot of them are in clusters around the world.
:-)
96 would be a pretty small one. Heck, with as vague as the statement is, that could be 48 dual CPU, or 24 dual dual-core CPUs.
There's an SLI capable box that's been shown off for 32X FSAA in real time. 6 of them, linked with the Nvidia Genlock/Framelock cards, moving a rendering/raytracing of a car in real time, no jaggies.
First time I've ever seen a line around a tradebooth that wasn't handing out schwag.
My computer screen has 1600x1200 pixels. 100 million pixels would be 52 of these screens. Let's say there are 4 walls - that's 8 screens per wall...big deal :P
Let me get out my check book...
Something Witty Goes Here
5-8-06
Contacts:
James Oliver, Virtual Reality Applications Center, (515) 294-2649
Chiu-Shui Chan, Architecture, (515) 294-8326
Eve Wurtele, Genetics, Development and Cell Biology, (515) 294-8989
Mark Bryden, Mechanical Engineering, (515) 294-3891
Mike Krapfl, News Service, (515) 294-4917
/
The most realistic virtual reality room in the world
AMES, Iowa -- More than $4 million in equipment upgrades will shine 100 million pixels on Iowa State University's six-sided virtual reality room.
(image)C6 battlespace
(image caption)Jared Knutzon, an Iowa State University graduate student in human computer interaction, demonstrates how Iowa State's C6 virtual reality room can control the military's unmanned aerial vehicles.
That's twice the number of pixels lighting up any virtual reality room in the world and 16 times the pixels now projected on Iowa State's C6, a 10-foot by 10-foot virtual reality room that surrounds users with computer-generated 3-D images. That means the C6 will produce virtual reality at the world's highest resolution.
Iowa State's C6 opened in June 2000 as the country's first six-sided virtual reality room designed to immerse users in images and sound. The graphics and projection technology that made such immersion possible hasn't been updated since the C6 opened.
The difference between the equipment currently in the C6 and the updated technology to be installed this summer, "is like putting on your glasses in the morning," said James Oliver, the director of Iowa State's Virtual Reality Applications Center and a professor of mechanical engineering.
The new equipment -- a Hewlett-Packard computer featuring 96 graphics processing units, 24 Sony digital projectors, an eight-channel audio system and ultrasonic motion tracking technology -- will be installed by Fakespace Systems Inc. of Marshalltown. The project is supported by a U.S. Department of Defense appropriation through the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
The project began this spring with a prototype upgrade to one wall of the C6. The remainder of the work will continue throughout the summer. Oliver said the improved C6 will open in the fall. A grand opening celebration is being planned for the spring of 2007.
A better C6 will be good news for the Iowa State researchers who study virtual reality.
Chiu-Shui Chan, an Iowa State professor of architecture, has used the C6 to develop 3-D models of buildings, cities and workplaces. He's studying how virtual reality can be a tool to create a library of historical buildings, plan urban growth and test workplace efficiency.
(image)virtual Beijing
(image caption) A virtual model of the Xidan business district in Beijing can help city planners manage urban growth.
Chan said the upgrade will improve the visual realism and interactive speed of his virtual reality applications. And that will enhance the sense of place in his applications and the effectiveness of his research.
Chan said the C6's existing technology requires him to balance and sacrifice some of a project's size, speed, realism or human-computer interaction. "With the new system I won't have to worry about that," he said.
Eve Wurtele, an Iowa State professor of genetics, development and cell biology, working with Julie Dickerson, an Iowa State associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, has used the C6 to develop new ways to visualize data from as many as 22,000 genes. She's also developing a virtual cell project that shows cells in 3-D action to help students learn about photosynthesis and other aspects of cell biology.
Wurtele said the higher speeds and better pictures will be a boost for her research and teaching.
"This upgrade is fantastic for us," she said. "It's essential for our research."
Mark Bryden, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, has used virtual reality to develop engineering tools that he
vr pr0n would probably be the first to capitalize and commercialize this technology. but i think it's the virtual sex industry that will totally redefine how this technology is used. we see it in cheezy 80's sci-fi movies (ok, cheezy sci-fi movies in general) all the time; virtual sex in a virtual world, with a virtual woman of your dreams. yikes...
The ISU press release does not mention it, but the new C6 will be driven by open source technologies such as VR Juggler, OpenSG, and of course, Linux.
Cache
Does anybody really think the Gov'ment is using our money wisely? Do we really need to be spending millions to set up virtual reality?
I mean, anyone experience a fantasy world on the cheap just by listening to Bush or the WH briefings...
does the term Holodeck ring a bell to anybody?
I just dont get why multi-million dollar visualisation equipement create better research. And I've work in a HPC research center where we have a very nice 3D screen powered by a massive SGI.. And never saw it used to any significant research, sure its a nice toy and its a nice way to blow research dollars. But what a waste. And anyways, most of the time, most researchers where doing their visuation in their offices with their PCs and nvidia/ati cards and their consumer grade crts.. And I'm sure they could see plenty.
Ames, Iowa is the most boring, backward place in Iowa, which puts it pretty high in the running for worst place ever in the universe.
That being said, I'm glad they have something to do besides light each other on fire during VEISHA.
This VR room really is pointless, though, and should go somewhere much cooler, like up a bum's asshole.
What will they think of next?!
"There has got to be cheap way to do this at home. "
Take one frosted fishbowl attached to a collar. Add projectors around perimeter. Throw in motion tracking body suit. Mix with lots of software. Serve a year later on slashdot.
Your missing a piece of this though.
Its in 3d.
Doing 3d is no big deal for a small screen when the viewer is in a fixed perspective, but when you ware walking around the room the images have to change to keep the proper 3d perspective. Doing all of that for a 6 sided room in high deffinition and on-the-fly takes some serious horse power.
(BTW, I was in it in 1999 when it was 4 sided (floor and 3 walls))
Certainly, there might be a few one-off HMD research models out there, using some exotic display technology (or just a ramped up form of current display tech) to achieve extremely high resolutions coupled with wide FOV angles, but I doubt it (if that kind of tech existed, we would see in projectors and TV's today, as that market is much larger and lucrative). Even if such HMDs did exist, they wouldn't be cheap. Some of the best HMDs out there, built by companies like Kaiser-ElectroOptics, sell for around $250,000 - and still don't approach the FOV and resolution levels of most CAVE systems. Certainly these HMDs are very nice, and have their own benefits (like not needing an entire HUGE room to setup and use them in), but for massively immersive virtual environments, where a full and realistic FOV is needed, with extreme resolution to bring visual acuity at or near 20/20, a CAVE cannot be beat.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Of course such a room is very interesting for information visualisation. I think the next best thing is to hardwire a computer to our brain so we don't need a room for so much resolution. And this also would benefit better use of augmented reality
I went to ISAR in 2000, in those days even SGI's weren't getting close to get all the computing force AR typically needs. I wonder how AR is now developing. AR is maybe more interesting for interaction designers to make virtual interfaces for objects from the real world. I have experience many AR applications on ISAR and it gave me a deep impression which VR never has given me. People who find AR interesting (the next really big thing) should follow this link
PS: if someone wants to prove me the VR experience of this thing I might say "hmm.. maybe that's an interesting offer"
I search it for traps!
I made my Search Roll. What do I find?!?
MY EYES! The goggles, they do nothing!
I used to teach system admin and hardware repair courses for the Origin2000 and Onyx2 at SGI, and when the class was in Mountain View one module was to visit the "Reality Wall". That screen had only 24 Megapixels projected onto a 120 degree wrap around screen, but even at that the flight simulator was so realistic that students would fall out of their chairs when the plane took a curve.
Poor old SGI. They built amazingly excellent hardware, bleeding edge software, paid their workers well, treated employees like kings and customers like emporers, and donated heavily to the open source movement.
So, of course they went bankrupt.
Done in by the Microslop-ization of technology.
We who were once the high preists of the cult of technology, wizards of electronic wonder, have become the janitors of the Microsoft plumbing, fit only to plunge out the cr@p that clogs the email pipes.
By allowing slackers in our ranks to use shrink-wrap scumware to badly execute business functions cheaply, we have fallen from grace.
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
Why does that allways happen w/ pugs?
Every time!
ON Rexxar, I don't have that problem due to my awesome guild Gothic-Justice!
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
ISU made slashdot
That would be a whole new perspective...
I'll take that bet and raise you 104,800,000 pixels.
http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/hiperwall/
204,800,000 pixels - sans any dead ones.
Cheers,
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
As a Junior at Iowa State in the Mechanical Engineering program (which funds a big chunk of C6 acticities) I wish the C6 program would die already. The ME department has been sucking money out of resources the bulk of the students here use, in order to pay for a toy only a few people at the university will ever use.
I've been inside the thing before on a tour, and yes, it's pretty cool inside when they run the 3D flyover demo, but nobody there could explain what is being done in the 3D cave that can't be done with a set of VR goggles or a regular computer screen. As a student, it boils my blood that the department does away with useful tools for students like liceneses for CAD software because of "the budget crunch," but it can still afford to piss away millions on TOY for a few professors and their grad student slaves.
...toy, plain and simple.
Unless there is something seriously seriously wrong with the universe.
and the best looking fighters they can show look like theyr came straight out of Tron?
Am I materialist ?
For(k;;)(Fork();)
For the price that some people spend on gaming PCs nowadays I'd bet it would be possible to build a miniture version of one of these CAVES for relatively inexpensive price.
4 or 5 LCD projectors with 3 or so Linux PCs with decent proccessors and dual headed video cards running Debian or whatever would do the trick.
So about 800 dollars for the PCs and 900-1000 for the projectors as well as furnishing the room and whatnot would come out for less then ten grand. If your wealthy, or at least have good credit you could probably build a high resolution one for 20-30 grand.
Imagine the possibilities for promotional stuff. Put it all in a trailer or whatnot. Setup some simple games. Or if your a architect you could make life-size mock-ups of your designs and let your customers navigate around in their virtual house.
I would be great stuff.
Now if I was smart I'd look into starting a company doing this stuff...
that they anounce it on the opening day of E3, especially as the game the guy is playing in TFA looks totally crap for 100 million pixels. 1 word for that idiot: Metal Gear Solid 4.
that is all i can say.
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
...and flat shaded, ~20 poly-count blue planes.
Iowa state proudly boasts that they can render over ten million exactly the same color blue pixels at a time - a world record for any single polygon*.
*When asked if the reason for this record was because no one else cares about wasting so many pixels to display exactly the same piece of information on a single circa 1990 polygon, the program director got so upset he completely refused to show journalists the advanced terapixel-pong project in the next room.
100M pixels on a 10' cube means 100000000 / (120 * 120 * 6) = 1157 pixels:inch^2, or 34dpi. Typical screen resolution is 72dpi, so this "VR" is less than 1/4 the resolution we're used to. Though viewing from approximately 5' distance in the room, rather than 2' on a PC, compensates quite a lot. OTOH, at least half those pixels aren't seen by a single viewer (behind them), and most of the rest are seen only outside the hi-rez foveas in the middle of their eyes' view field.
I'd be more impressed with a 10' cube paneled with UXGA LCDs, with about 130dpi, with logic that doesn't bother rendering the unseen panels. Quadruple the resolution, but at most double the displayed pixels - maybe only 100M or less. The problems registering the panels seem easier than registering the projections along 488 edges, too.
--
make install -not war
So what's the warrenty on dead pixels?
As part of my dissertation work involves using such a room (we use a Fakespace CAVE with three walls, cluster of 3 Windows PC's for rendering), I have to put my two cents in. The CAVE allows for better spatial perception than any other VR tool i've used so far. When you're in it, a sense of immersion occurs, to the point where people are ducking to avoid obstacles (I give demos on a regular basis) and get queasy if you screw with the orientation. Below are some references for work done in such an environment. It's pretty nifty, but I think the possible uses for these things have not been exhausted, especially as a scientific tool. Although, admittedly. this system is more expensive and space-consuming than goggles. A little less clumsy, though, and you can collaborate with others inside of it. Fernando, T., Marcelino, L., (2000). Interactive Assembly Modeling within a CAVE Environment. 16-18th Feb. 2000. Portuguese Chapter of EuropGraphics. pp43-49 Snap2Diverse: Coordinating Information Visualizations and Virtual Environments Nicholas F. Polys, Chris North, Doug A. Bowman, Andrew Ray, Maxim Moldenhauer, Chetan Dandekar
I'm somewhat wary of VR systems in universities.
As far as I can see, VR is good for a few things:
1. Simulating things that would otherwise be extremely difficult, or expensive to achieve in reality. An example is battle training pilots for the latest 300 million dollar Sitting Bull (or some such Indian name) Helli-go-wobble with search and destroy missiles, go-faster stripes, and big bore smoke stacks. If you make the simulation good enough, you can let them make mistakes that would kill our guys, and cost millions. This is good, as you'll get much better pilots, and you'll save your pilot's lives, equipment, and money in wartime.
2. Creating interactive mock-ups of future products. You can watch the machine that you're designing working before you've built one. This could be valuable in some circumstances, especially if building a prototype will cost a million dollars. This process can avoid real problems, as people often can't envision spatial problems with prototypes until they've seen them function.
3. Playing around and having fun.
As far as I can see, universities don't do the first one (except perhaps ADFA/West Point/Sandhurst/RMC). They sometimes do the second one when partnering with industry. They often do the third one. My take on this is that if the university in Idaho does the second one, then it's justified. It doesn't even need to be efficient - I don't look for efficiency in US government spending, considering the huge amounts of money that the US government wastes. The money is going to an American company, so you can think of it as wealth redistribution if you want.
I do believe that there is a big place in universities for high performance computing. Many theories require HPC for early validation. However, that doesn't mean that the researcher needs to be able to see a VR simulation of the Pi-Muoun splitting into a potato and an egg.
but compare playing a typical 3d game at the same resolution on a 14" monitor and then play it on a 21" or larger.
Despite the extra blockyness doesn't it feel like a better experience?
This is just taking that up a few levels.
I wonder if making a seamless round cave is the next level in this kind of visualisation/interaction system.
Virtual Boy!!!11!!1 Whether or not the ISU C6 will be able to topple the Virtual Boy as the top gateway into the 3D world is still yet to be seen. Where's the side-by-side comparison tests? I imagine that the possibility of emulating the Virtual Boy will, while being illegal under most circumstances, improve the sales of the C6 drastically, since owners of the C6 will be killing two birds with one stone. Look at what console emulation has done for the PSP scene...
"For everything, there's Rupees. For everything else... there's Master Sword."
The ISU cluster consists of 48 HP workstations, model xw9300. Each has two AMD Opteron processors, and two nVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 GPUs (not configured in SLI mode). There's a bunch of nVIDIA G-sync connectivity to lock the video frames and buffer swaps. The workstations are running Linux. Undisclaimer: I work for HP. :-)
I work as the head of visualization at an HPC center, and I have to say that you are right in many cases. However, there are plenty of times when such a facility, or a Powerwall, is warranted. Let me try to outline some of the use cases:
1. Public relations, presentation. These facilities are used all the time to present scientific results to program managers, collaborators, funding agencies, and the like. Don't underestimate the power of these types of presentations. Though it's not "real science," they can often convince people with the purse strings of the important/quality of the "real science."
2. Collaboration. Displaying and discussing scientific results while crowded around someone's laptop sucks. Even a 30" Apple display can only accomodate so many people. These large facilities allow for entire working groups to discuss results and calculations. That's fairly valuable for scientific collaboration.
3. High-resolution data. There are some simulation domains that have such high spatial resolution that you simply can't see a single time step in full detail without a large display. Imagine a hydrodynamics instability problem calculated on a 2k^3 grid. Your monitor can't display that. Or a molecular dynamics calculation with a billion atoms. Map/GIS data also fits into this category easily.
4. Data aggregation. Even for low-resolution data, it can be useful to lay out multiple timesteps on one display to see them all at once. Or if you have a simulation with a large numbers of degrees of freedom, you might want to see, say, 20 of those variables at once. You can't do that on an office display. You need a high-resolution display to do that data aggregation and correlation.
Those are some of the basic use cases that I've seen in my work. I hope this discussion is useful.