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U of CA Constructs 220 Million Pixel Display
eldavojohn writes "Engineers at the University of California, San Diego have built a 220 million pixel display across 55 high-resolution tiled screens. Linked via optical fiber to Calit2's building at UC Irvine, the display can deliver real-time rendered graphics simultaneously across 420 million pixels to audiences in Irvine and San Diego."
they're an hour apart. that's a lot of people fighting over the remote.
That's all good, but are our eyes capable of viewing every single px of it?
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
Then we'll talk.
How we know is more important than what we know.
University of California at San Diego.
Can't samezenpus get the least bit of editorial right? Oh, yeah, he can't. He's samzenpus, and he's not an editor, he's an idiotor.
I mean wtf is U of CA? I've never seen it written like that, ever.
And to get this rant back on topic:
Is the screen effervescent?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Just in time for my $420 million webpage.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Eye strain might be something now... :S
signature is pants
. . . they could have found a better solution that didn't have the bevels.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
It's not a display, it's a tanning salon for geeks.
The only thing is, they'll risk overexposing themselves to pr0n and who knows what kind of a mark that'll leave on virgin skin.
Now we can watch our undefeated football team in all its glory.
pac-man anyone?
But seeing as I lack the budget or space for such a display or it's roomful of wiring and rendering nodes, I'm stuck with my trusty old GDM-W900 crt. Hehe.
mine was... What's the return policy on dead pixels?
My first thought was 'but does it play Doom?'
The worst part is the ACRONYM to describe it - LTSOFCKNPXLSUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUQSUXGA+.
"Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
The resolution of the human eye is relatively minute (it's usually not measured in MP, but I think the best equivelence was quoted around 15 MP at any given time). The easiest way to explain it, I think, is that your eyes are never in the same position for more than a split second. It's constantly moving and looking at any given object from a multitude of different angles. So no, it isn't able to see 220MP, but at the same time, it is (theoretically) able to see a better image with a higher pixel count, because of the fact that your eye is never stationary.
But that doesn't take into account your brain. Your eye transfers raw data to your brain similar to a bitmap/RAW file. The way your brain processes this information, though, is more like a vector image. Our brains "see" lines and shapes much more than it sees individual points of colours. Which makes the answer even more complicated. We don't really see all the pixels, but we're able to piece together most of the pixels while our eyes move about, ALTHOUGH our brain "transforms" that information so it makes more sense to us.
A really neat example that illustrates how the brain processes raw data: close your eyes, and get a friend (or yourself, if you can trust yourself not to cheat) to hold up something that is near the outer edge of your peripheral vision. Open your eyes, but don't move them - keep looking straight ahead so that the object is still near the edge of your peripheral vision. You can SEE the object, and can possibly even tell what it is. But what colour is the object? Even though your eyes are able to see colour even in your peripheral vision, the brain doesn't think that the information of colour is as important as the outline/shape of the object. It is only when something is near the centre of your vision (in other words, where your attention usually is) that you can tell what colour it is.
I mean, it's not a single display: it's a hundred LCDs stitched together.
When they create a 220 million LCD screen, then great.
This sig left intentionally blank.
More like U to the C to the A fo' shizzle!
WARNING parent is goatse
Silicon Graphics' Onyx IR4 could drive this many pixels, couldn't it?
... and OpenGL Performer could make it all work nicely for visualisation too. I wonder what's happened to OpenGL Performer.
IIRC, it was 16 pipes, 8 displays per pipe, 1920x1200 per display - I make that almost 300M (pixels, not dollars - it'd be *many* more dollars) - probably not remembering correctly, but still.
Max.
People who are dismissing as just a wall of monitors are mistaken. It takes dozens of computers to run that resolution, which is no trivial task. This is not a theater system, so complaining about seams misses the point entirely. If they were just looking for a semi-large seamless screen, any shmuck could just use a single projector.
This system allows groups of researchers to review large amounts of visual data in both macro and micro scale. If you want to see the micro scale, you simply walk up to an individual monitor. Review can be done simultaneously among many people.
For a seamless, 100 million pixel projection screen (this is also not trivial, as removing seams requires real time brightness and color correction along edges) can be viewed here. In comparison, an IMAX theater uses a very large single projector unit weighing nearly 2 tons.
The sister screen at UCI can be viewed at here.
It is conceivable that soon technology/engineering will make it possible to have a multi billion pixel display.
;)
An interesting application might be to assign a pixel to each person living. Then as they pass through the phases of life, their brightness could wax and wane. Also perhaps color could be used to identify race or geography.
Might be an interesting display in a world's fair/expo kind of context. Being able to walk right up to it and realizing that you are just one of the billions of little dots could be pretty awe inspiring.
Perhaps it would give new meaning to the comment "he seems kinda bright". (ba du bum
I was imagining a beowulf display of those.
I want to watch porn on this screen~
This is what they say in public:
"...allows us to experiment on the two campuses with distributed teams that can collaborate and share insights derived from a better understanding of complex results."
But it private:
"this is fucking awesome!"
So how many bad pixels do I need before they'll exchange this thing? http://news.com.com/2102-1041_3-5579493.html?tag=s t.util.print
My sofa is six feet from the wall.. Reckon that's too close?
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything. - Oscar Wilde
Did anyone else have to square root this to see if it was impressive or not?
San Diego University?
Deleted
Or, you could have a killer video update from the beach, the whole wall of your apartment could look like you were standing at the edge of the water. DO want!
stuff |
How many dead pixels before I can return this thing? I hope it's more than 8...
It's a Beowolf cluster of NVidia Quadro Fx5600 graphics cards. There are 55 XPS monitors driven by 18 Dell XPS systems combined with grid computing middleware (ROCKS), and graphics API (Cluster GL/CGLX).
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I don't fancy the flat version... ... any chance of a 170 degree semi-circular arrangement and a BlueGene/L running the rendering for an utterly awesome first person shooter???
I work at the Broad Institute on the MIT campus. In the lobby of our building there is a transected cyclinder (think half a burrito cut at a 45 degree angle) made up of seventy-six ~40" LCD screens. The video on them is contiguous, with background elements floating from one screen to another and animations running accross several adjacent screens at once. Conservatively assuming a resolution of 1366 x 768 for each screen, this is at least an 80 megapixel display. Anyone have more details?
Larger minesweeper tiles!
"borrowed" from todays cartoon: http://www.userfriendly.org/
But will Vista play HD content on it?
Basically this is just an up-to-date Reality Centre. Nothing particularly revolutionary about it these days.
Max.
"Engineers at the University of California, San Diego have built a 220 million pixel display across 55 high-resolution tiled screens."
And we get to see a 300x150 picture of it.
It's nice to see they're keeping their bandwidth for the ads instead of the actual content...
Yeah more then the Viva Vision canopy part of the Fremont Street Experience in Vegas which is only 12.5 million pixels down about 1,400 feet. But it certainly is impressive with the right show (or equally lousy with the wrong one).
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I believe the top end telescope is now around 3 gigapixels, by suturing a few hundred large CCD chips. The image is not meant for direct human consumption, but pre-analyzed by computer.
His Grandness Stevus Jobus has ordered that this new 220MP display to be the default monitor for the next release of iMac.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They have a "hyperwall" that sounds a bit like this in the Calit2 building here at UCI. 50 Apple Monitors stacked 5 high, 10 wide. The guy who showed me it said they use it for some sort of medical imaging or something. Put a couple thousand cat scans of peoples heads up on the display. Also displayed various protein models and the like. I asked someone else here how much it cost. Apparently you can get bulk discounts when you do this kindof stuff. My favorite part was what was behind the display. Each pair of monitors was hooked up to its own mac. There was a whole stack of these computers sitting behind the display. Whenever something is displayed, all the fans in all the computers rev up, so it sounds a bit like an AC.
Can we hack it to play Battle Field 2 on the screen? I want to be in the game!
And when their pixel turns red they're forced to go to Carousel.
220,000,000 pixels, 55 tiles, puts the pixels per tile at about 4,000,000, so possibly 2560x1600 resolution on each tile. Looking at the image it appears they just stuck 55 LCD monitors together, so it's probably really not that big of a deal to replace a single tile. It doesn't look like they even bothered to remove or replace the monitor casing, since there are thick black borders in between each 'tile'.
While the processing and real-time displaying of images on these giant screens is pretty sweet, and a cool achievement, the display hardware itself should be a weekend diy for anyone who can foot the bill for 55 HD flat panels.
So yeah. 4 pixels per display. And I need to see the original receipt. This is a copy. No, I understand that this is a copy, but the policy says I need to see the original. Look, I don't make the rules. I would get my manager, but she's going to tell you the same thing. Well she's on lunch, so you can't talk to her right now.
http://www.mersive.com/
tiled displays have been constructed at numerous institutes/universities/even companies... what's the novel stuffs here? only more pixels??
now.
Badges!?! We don't need no stinking badges!
even run Vista Aero...
My other sig is a knife wound.
Neat, but does it run linux?
I find multiplying X and Y pixelcounts to get numbers like "220 million pixels" almost meaningless, because most people's intution of how exponents progress (including my own) is way off. (here's an experiment: pour some pennies onto a flat surface. Arrange them so none overlap, just a flat grouping. Guess how many there are. Then count. You probably underestimated. "10 x 10" creates a larger number than most folks' intution "expects".)
For the same reason, I find having cameras rated in megapixels annoying, and usually try to guesstimate what the resolutions would be.
Compounding this is the increase in 16:9 ratio video items, vs the old 4:3.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
The only new thing here is the utterly dumb way of citing UCSD. It's part of the "UC" or "Univeristy of California" system -- not "U of CA".
Why not use projectors and eliminate the LCD borders? Sure you need good curtains, but big deal!
Projectors FTW!!!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Too much to see here. Move along.
Have gnu, will travel.
I tried to view the picture of this, but it won't fit on my paltry two monitors...
. . . oh, wait . . . I guess that's what they're working on, huh?
did anybody else read the article and notice that San Diego's display goes to 11?
(columns of 5)
Before they equal Frank's 2000-inch TV.
Just asking.
I read about this in InformationWeek. The author describes the setup it is utilizing 50 tiled consumer grade Dell and Apple monitors using consumer video cards. Does this mean that the actual resolution, expressed in DPI, is the same as widely available consumer monitors. The display is big, but otherwise, what is the big deal?