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."

Comments

Re:This looks really good, but also such a waste

[Niet3sche]

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.

There actually are things you can do in the C6 that you cannot do with goggles. For one - and to name something that I know is implementable and implemented - you can track body posturing and position within the C6 to make the experience more engaging/real. Any pictures just do not do this justice; the "seams" shown in the picture are not nearly as obvious in the real thing. On that note, I will say that I've nearly walked into the wall before (on the old system), and missed walking into the screen by a matter of about 6 inches.

With respect to your other comment, the part about interoperability (The goggles would also have the benefit of being runnable on relatively standand class hardware), sometimes you want and need specialized solutions to do great things. Just because you or I cannot hope to afford such a system doesn't invalidate the system.

I just dont get it

[Tester]

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.

Poor SGI

[couch_warrior]

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.