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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.
pac-man anyone?
mine was... What's the return policy on dead pixels?
Its tiled displays. This is really more about something along the lines of technology(think video card) capable of outputting ridiculous resolutions.
Its 50x 30" displays, its not about the display so much as the cluster of 18 computers/video cards working together. That sets each individual computer at rendering just under 3 displays each. An easy feat in and of itself. Now getting it to work syncronously with 17 other computers... thats neat.
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.
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
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
Did anyone else have to square root this to see if it was impressive or not?
Here's picture of the Broad display: http://www.justinmanor.com/Broad/crx.jpg