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."

Comments

Across Irvine and San Diego?

[admactanium]

they're an hour apart. that's a lot of people fighting over the remote.

Remove the seams

[QuantumG]

Then we'll talk.

Re:Remove the seams

[Fred_A]

I think that since you're supposed to look at it from 7km away you can't see the seams.

The main problem is that they need 408 repeaters for the USB mouse and keyboard.

It's called UCSD or

[Ohreally_factor]

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?

Re:It's called UCSD or

[mchanaud]

as a non american, U of CA is much more comprehensible than UCSD. But, wait, who really matters about non american readers?

Re:It's called UCSD or

[MrNaz]

We're also aware that /. is run by Americans, and that Americans aren't aware that there are any Universities in Canada.

Mods: That's a joke. That's "haha" as distinctly opposed to "die troll scumbag take this -1 and then we'll see who has the last laugh!".

$420 Million Webpage

[Joebert]

Just in time for my $420 million webpage.

Re:Human eyes

[tonsofpcs]

No. "It's exciting," said Joerg Meyer, a professor of computer graphics and visualization who helped develop the screen's software. "This display has higher resolution than the human retina can see." http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/californi a/la-me-highdef13aug13,1,5603082.story?coll=la-hea dlines-pe-california

Re:My first thought,,,

[RuBLed]

mine was... What's the return policy on dead pixels?

No, but yes

[SpeedyDX]

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.

Re:No, but yes

[wumpus188]

No. You cannot see the color of the peripheral object because the cone cells, which are responsible for the color vision, become sparse towards the edge of the retina.

Re:No, but yes

[E 99]

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).

It's not usually measured in pixel count because pixel count is an entirely irrelevant concept to eye resolution. The angular resolution of the eye is extremely high at the center of the image, and falls off extremely rapidly in a very steep bell curve. So unlike a monitor, the number of pixels across the eye's vision does not correlate at all to the maximum angular resolution of the eye.

Re:No, but yes

[$random_var]

Your eye transfers raw data to your brain similar to a bitmap/RAW file.

No. While the bulk of the signal processing is performed in what is theorized to be a 4-layer neural network, the retina is actually able to perform a substantial amount of processing on its own. For example, lateral inhibition between receptors highlights edges - at the edge of black and white, the data that is sent to the brain actually shows the black as more black and the white as more white. There are also thought to be motion detectors in the retina, color processing (our "red" and "green" cones are actually very, very close in their wavelength responses, and both even overlap with the "blue" response curve, so it requires some processing to actually separate the colors out), and far more that we still don't understand. The actual rods and cones make up a small part of the complicated network that is the retina.

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.

No. You can't see color in your peripheral vision because the periphery of your retina is optimized for motion and brightness, ie it contains mostly rods instead of cones. There is also a higher convergence of individual receptors onto ganglia.

Talking about the eye as it related to a pixellated display is meaningless, because the eye does not see in, strictly, pixels, and the eye's receptors show significant spatial variation. Higher resolution will still translate into smoother curves, finer motions, and so on, and that will still have some effect on our subjective perception of the display.

IR4

[dwater]

Silicon Graphics' Onyx IR4 could drive this many pixels, couldn't it?

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. ... and OpenGL Performer could make it all work nicely for visualisation too. I wonder what's happened to OpenGL Performer.

Not a theater system!

[ejito]

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.