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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?
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?
"That's no moon!"
John
But according to Slashdot VR is useless hype.
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.
No, irony is kind of like bronzey or goldy, only with iron. Ironic is when you write a song about irony where none of the situations mentioned are in fact ironic at all.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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 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?
You could probably do it on the cheap, but better? These people aren't throwing out money for some half-assed system.
OTOH, I don't see any reason why a person couldn't do this on the cheap and have something that's a few years behind (but since it's your own personal one, it's still cool). Hey, it may even be better than the one they are upgrading from 2000!:)
They used a 10 foot x 10 foot room. No biggie, practically a big walk-in closet. Then come some projectors and computers with video cards driving it. The biggest challenge would be software to sync it all and actually make it work together. Not sure about the options out there, but I imagine it would be doable.
I'd imagine a mouse and keyboard would be out of the question though, for most interaction. So what, then?
Hm, 24 monitors, right? Not exactly MY definition of cheap, but there you go... More adequately something like three two four good projectors powered by a small yet powerful cluster is what I'd suggest.
Anyway, welcome to the holodeck!
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
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
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
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.
There has got to be cheap way to do this at home.
Yeah, I can give you about 80% of that for only half price.
KFG
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
Actually, the CAVE room is a room inside a much larger room. Some space is saved by using mirrors and such to fold the optical path of the projectors, but sometimes this isn't desireable, as mirrors cause light loss (some of the light is absorbed by the mirrors - mirrors aren't 100% reflective). Things get really tricky if you are trying to project imagery on the top (ceiling) or bottom (floor) of the CAVE cubical...
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"
wireless mice designed for people giving powerpoint presentations are a nice cheap solution. E.g: http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/products/product listns/US/EN,crid=1999,categoryid=371
If you find one that's not wireless, it might be a whole lot cheaper.
Also I used to have a finger mouse I got for like 2 bucks that had a little trackball on top for the thumb with the mouse button as trigger, but lost it.
If you have some time and expertise, you can do some motion tracking with webcams. The lower the resolution, the faster, actually!
For software though I have no choice but to selfishly invite people to join the interreality project (http://interreality.org) which can't do a CAVE out of the box but could if you synced up several clients (one for each projector) -- not hard, we did it with an older version of our software.
I sooo wanted to be the first one to come up with the holodeck comparison. I made a /. account practically just for this.
Anyway, that's it. Computer, delete character Antek.
"unable to comply. He's not part of the simulation"
what the hell..Computer, exit..I'm outa here....:)
640KB of virtualized ram will be enough for everybody
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"
If you're doing it on the cheap and only have three or four projectors, you don't need much of a cluster, just a three or four networked computers. Or, use two dualhead computers.
. asp
You'll have a small amount of lag in the syncronization (network + OS + application software) but with some tweaking of the OS network configuration, or using some insanely fast system rather than a network (shared memory backplane?), you might get it to a few ms?
If you want frame-by-frame synchronization you need some specialized equipment driving the projectors, stuff like this: http://www.es.com/products/image+generators/index
(Anyone making a homebrew CAVE want to try using http://interreality.org/ VOS software in it?)
Sure there is, buy an Onyx2 and get some projectors. They can be had from anywhere between $0 and a few thousand dollars depending on config/circumstances. If you're lucky you can find one in a dumpster. You can find some Onyx3x0/3x000 on the market (most are still chugging along with their original owners) but the cost is very high .
A single pipe with a DG5-8 can drive up to 8 monitors, not sure of the res./monitor you'd get though. I only have specs for the InfiniteReality4 (IR4) but 16 pipes gets you 133 million pixels, I think this is the same for IR3 was well. Realistically you'd only need at most one pipe per wall of your CAVE.
There's a port of Quake, Quake II, and QuakeIII for SGI, I have it on my O2 :)
Here's a very cool page, this guy actually works with a CAVE (and an Onyx2) and he likes Quake! (Also, checkout the wall this guy has access too!)
It's a sad story about SGI, I think even if they survive long term as a company that the "G" in their name is already dead.
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.
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...
I vaugely remember a comedians routine where he tried to make all of those situations really ironic. For example "It's like rain on your wedding day" became "It's like rain on your wedding day when you're getting married to a weather man and he picked the date".
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
...toy, plain and simple.
and the best looking fighters they can show look like theyr came straight out of Tron?
They're upgrading FROM an Onyx4 for a reason. The thing is a pain in the ass to work with, and can't push 1/10th the polys of newer systems with modern graphics cards.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
I sooo wanted to be the first one to come up with the holodeck comparison. I made a /. account practically just for this.
Being as this story is "from the holodeck-wannabe dept.", I'd say your efforts were doomed before they began.
Am I materialist ?
For(k;;)(Fork();)
"What will they think of next?!"
Well, now that Star Trek is gone, the future looks gloomy.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
You're obviously not very familiar with Iowa. There are plenty of other places that make ames look like NYC.
...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
Ummm the question was "how to do this cheap at home." It was not "what should the University do." What did you miss?
A few more comments: I've used Onyx systems before and they are joys to work with. Oh, I also should mention that the summary says the University was using an Onyx2, not an Onyx4. And BTW, an Onyx4 uses (many) thoroughly modern ATI graphics cards. So I don't think there's anything in your post that's correct. Too bad there's no "-1 Wrong" moderation option.
So what's the warrenty on dead pixels?
This is actually a lot of corporate money (SGI, and others) that was put in to visualize anything from chemical bonds to aerospace models and more. Sometimes seeing things big and in high def is a truly great way to study something and be able to see it inside and out. Imagine walking inside a CAD/CAM model of the space shuttle during a launch and finding out ahead of time about the foam problem. (just a wild and improbably forinstance, but the idea is the same). Granted there is -some- government money, but its not how youd imagine. Some comes out of students' pockets (I'd imagine very little), etc etc..
-blt@iastate.edu
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
Projectors that can support this kind of system in active vr cost a LOT more than you think. (active is lcd shutter glasses, rather than passive which is polarized lenses) The projectors in the C6 at present cost something like $50,000 each, and the mirrors to set up the space were even more than that. The projectors have to not only support 2x the visible framerate, but they have to support really tight constraints on display synchronization.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Don't put advice in your sig.
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."
What about a slashdot discussion about the latest advance in VR technology that devolves into a discussion about what irony is? Is that ironic?
Support the FairTax
What about putting advice in your sig advising not to put advice in your sig. Ironic?
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.
Don't put advice in your sig.
Jealous much?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!