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: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.

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.