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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!
"That's no moon!"
John
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
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.
For 100 million pixels, the graphics of those planes look pretty crap.
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
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.
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.
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))
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 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?)
Not a toy at all. As a CS ISU grad, and a friend of a researcher in the C6, I can attest that this has more uses than a toy. For instance, John Deere has used this to model new virtual cockpits for upcoming tractors. They can see if all controls are within reach and in reasonably intuitive places. If they aren't, they can change their positioning using a wand to grab them and move them. It has (or plans to) also been used with other caves to collaboratively develop models and see them work, such as a model of an engine.
It is quite an impressive feat. You can pick, grab, and move things around just like they are right in front of you. It is more than just 6 flat panels. You also wear lcd shutter glasses and make those 6 panels turn 3D. So when reaching out to grab things they are exactly where you would expect them to be.
However, it CAN be used as a toy even though that isn't it's primary purpose... I have also seen Quake played in the C4 (precursor to C6). Pretty cool to say the least.
You're obviously not very familiar with Iowa. There are plenty of other places that make ames look like NYC.
Don't put advice in your sig.