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

I need to get out more

[Craptastic Weasel]

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 not irony

[Anonymous Coward]

Irony is more like rain on your wedding day. Or maybe getting a free ride after you already paid. That kind of stuff.