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

Thats not all it will lead the field in

[192939495969798999]

(insert obligatory pr0n reference here)!

100 million pixels of virtual pr0n... nope, no way to hide that at work!

New Advances in Genetics, eh?

[bwcarty]

Is that their slang for VR porn?

Re:That's not irony

[spun]

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.

One last lame post

[fm6]

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.

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

[Niet3sche]

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.

There actually are things you can do in the C6 that you cannot do with goggles. For one - and to name something that I know is implementable and implemented - you can track body posturing and position within the C6 to make the experience more engaging/real. Any pictures just do not do this justice; the "seams" shown in the picture are not nearly as obvious in the real thing. On that note, I will say that I've nearly walked into the wall before (on the old system), and missed walking into the screen by a matter of about 6 inches.

With respect to your other comment, the part about interoperability (The goggles would also have the benefit of being runnable on relatively standand class hardware), sometimes you want and need specialized solutions to do great things. Just because you or I cannot hope to afford such a system doesn't invalidate the system.

Poor quality

[plumby]

For 100 million pixels, the graphics of those planes look pretty crap.

Re:Poor quality

[momerath2003]

It's all about the gameplay.

Re:HP GPUs?

[Niet3sche]

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?

I can only comment about the API - we're using something that is a standard (for us) and that fills in as nice middleware: VRJuggler. It sits atop (among other things) OpenGL.

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

[foxcorner]

There are no head-mounted displays that will deliver anything like the pixel resolution of a system like this. You simply wouldn't get the detail. And, the data infrastructure for this kind of project (where the aim is to visualize complex data) is not possible on "relatively standard class hardware". Another thing: In a cave environment like this, if you turn your head, the graphics view is updated only slightly or not at all. With a head-mount display, the whole scene has to swing round when you turn your head. If there's any latency in head-tracking (likely) or graphics rendering (possible), then the cave is much less unsettling per head-turn than is the head-mounted display. Less nausea. And another thing: you get a much larger peripheral view in a cave, leading to better understanding of context. Undisclaimer: I work for HP. :-)

Re:At least ISU is spending wisely

[shudde]

Such as spending 3k for Graphics design computers for use as word processors.

Good to see your university is getting ready for Vista.

I just dont get it

[Tester]

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.

Re:I just dont get it

[erko]

But with only one wall, you can't walk around and look at an object or visualization the way you would walk around a pillar. You can't lean over things and look at them from directly above or below. With a six-sided CAVE, you can. Being able to naturally move around 3D data has helped researchers discover new things in the same data they've looked at before with other methods.

Also, although the article's picture shows three visible screens, when you're in the C6, you don't see them as separate screens. It's not as if a few extra "walls" were added, it's as if you are surrounded by your environment.

Not so cheap

[MrTester]

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))

Poor SGI

[couch_warrior]

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.

Re:Cheap

[reed]

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.

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. asp

(Anyone making a homebrew CAVE want to try using http://interreality.org/ VOS software in it?)

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.

Re:That's not irony

[pcgabe]

That would be Irish comedian Ed Byrn. Other examples from this routine are:

No, there's nothing ironic about being stuck in a traffic jam when you're late for something. Unless you're a town planner. If you were a town planner and you were on your way to a seminar of town planners at which you were giving a talk on how you solved the problem of traffic congestion in your area, couldn't get to it because you were stuck in a traffic jam, that'd be well ironic: "I'm sorry I'm late, you'll never guess."

A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break, that's inconsiderate office management. A no-smoking sign in a cigarette factory - irony. It's not a difficult concept Alanis. It's very rare you see a ironic no-smoking sign, although if you ever see one of those that say 'Thank-you for not smoking' and you are: fairly ironic.