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

"/."-hype?

[Anonymous Coward]

But according to Slashdot VR is useless hype.

At least ISU is spending wisely

[zjl56]

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..

This looks really good, but also such a waste

[LiquidCoooled]

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.

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

[aliens]

Another post mentions tracking movement as a good reason for it you can't really use googles for, but I'll go one better.

How about it's great for having more than one person in there and you can point at a spot and keep talking. With googles you'd both have to be wearing them and you'd have to describe to the other person the point you are looking at.

At least that's what I thought of.

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

[Surt]

A head mounted display doesn't have to have that kind of pixel resolution. The input resolution to your brain is only about ~10 million elements in the eye, so with an up close goggle you can get away with something like 2-3 million pixels with no loss of detail. The head tracking issue is more relevant, though presumably you can again do better with a HUD because you can do fast inertial measurement at the head rather than having to use smart cameras to track. Then assuming you have an equal amount of processing power available to create the scene, the hardware required to render it to goggles will be much cheaper and more conventional.

RealityLens

[Anonymous Coward]

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/.

Re:One last lame post

[Joosy]

According to Merriam-Webster's ...

3 a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity

Given that SGI powered the first version of C6, and that C6 is receiving a massive upgrade, it would be an "expected result" that SGI would benefit. However, the "actual result" is that they declared bankruptcy on the same day. It could be said that this is an "incongruity." So it is not unreasonable to say that this is indeed ironic.