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Toys

The Ultimate Monitor 120

Posted by CmdrTaco from the you-gotta-be-kidding-me dept.
biscuit nipple sent us linkage to an amazing monitor: essentially, it's 3 integrated flat panels for a gigantic 3.9 megapixel wrap-around display. Probably costs as much as a convertible, but it sure looks cool.
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The Ultimate Monitor More

The Ultimate Monitor

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  • What's with all these companies trying to lure us in with their products and never telling us what the bill's going to be? Do they honestly think we'll let these things into our homes and then pay the $27,000 bill? (That being the price from the earlier article).

    Seriously, a lot of stuff can happen in one year. Has the price of this gone down any? I love the way they stick "low cost" in their product description, when you'd be way better off buying three CRTs and shoving them together if cost-effectiveness is the goal :-(.

    D

    ----
  • DVDs should look great on this. However, due to the fact that it is a flat panel, you can only use the native resolution (or a resolution that is 1/x as big, where x is an integer) without having the image either warped or anti-aliased, or even mangled by lopsided pixel sizing. It's like using 640x480 fullscreen on a laptop that has a 1024x768 screen; the output is either sized down, anti-aliased, or pixel-mangled (this pixel is 1x1, that one is 2x1, that one is 1x2, that one is 2x2!)

  • This reminds me of DOOM (Score:5)

    by evil_one ( 142582 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @08:39AM (#688736) Homepage
    back in the day when everyone took doom to work and installed it on the lan, the id guys gave us a cute little bonus:
    -left and -right
    this disapeared after doom 1.2, but made a re-emergence in doom legacy.
    What this did was quite simple. It provided a wraparound display! by placing monitors to the left and right of the primary display, you could turn your head to look instead of turning your character!
    It was essentially multihead for dos...
    ---

  • Um, ATI doesn't manufacture DVD players. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Correction: add to the end of this statement, ", but the licensee added one anyway." A contract requiring DVD licensees not to provide digital outputs would be legal under U.S. law, but ATI seems to be evidence that no such licensing regulation exists.

    ATI makes video cards, not DVD players. Only the maker of the DVD player is barred by the NDA he signed to become a DVD manufacturer from providing digital video outputs.

    This means no stand alone DVD players with non-analog video jacks.

    In a PC, everything is "a la carte" so the digital video rule does not make sense and does not apply.

  • Buy three SGI 1600SW's, pop them out of their cases, duct tape them together, voila!
  • Been done already, though with projection screens instead of flat-panel LCDs. A friend of mine showed me a university's Virtual Reality Cave a while back. It consists of 4 projection screens (front wall, side walls, floor) onto which are projected whatever image you want. Combine this with those LCD goggles which only allow you to see out of one eye at a time and hook the whole thing up to an SGI Onyx, and you have one hell of a 3D gaming machine. Some guy even wrote a port of Quake 2 [uiuc.edu] for the cave. Though the game itself is a little clumsy, it's amazingly immersive.

    You can do multiplayer, though only with other Cave Quake players (not too many of those around). When an enemy sneaks up behind you, they really are behind you. The best part, though, is the position sensors on the goggles and your control wand. When you see a rocket coming straight for your head, you don't just hit a key to dodge, you instinctively duck off to the side, just in time to see the rocket blast by your head. If any computer game can scare the living shit out of you, this is it. It's also a hell of a lot more fun to point your arm at an enemy (from your viewpoint, your gun is sort of superimposed over your arm.) to aim, rather than moving a mouse.

    The whole cave thing could get a lot smaller and more affordable with large flat panel displays, since they currently cost in the range of $70,000 for just the display system. The floor display would still be a problem, though it would be easier to do a 360 degree display than with the projectors. Even with flat panel displays, you're still gonna need a hell of a lot of cash to get one.

  • CmdrTaco, don't you read anything Hemo posts?

    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/11/04/1148 246
  • Multiple monitors are supported in XFree86. Check this message [google.com] (you'll have to manually delete a space because of a bug in SlashDot's posting CGI's) from a user who got it working. Also check the current XF86Config man page [xfree86.org] at www.xfree86.org [xfree86.org].

    The jargon they use for this is "multi-head configuration". I'll just quote one small part of the manpage:

    Here is an example of a ServerLayout section for a dual headed configuration with two mice:
    Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier "Layout 1"
    Screen "MGA 1"
    Screen "MGA 2" RightOf "MGA 1"
    InputDevice "Keyboard 1" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice "Mouse 1" "CorePointer"
    InputDevice "Mouse 2" "SendCoreEvents"
    Option "BlankTime" "5"
    EndSection

    - Robert
  • $22,750 will get you 14.7 megapixels worth of SGI 1600SW [sgi.com] monitors. That's $5833 USD/megapixel for the so-called "Ultimate Monitor" and $1526 USD/megapixel for the SGI 1600SW. Reminds me of the saying about a fool and his money...

    --

  • And I could buy 3 20" CRT's and hook them up to a Mac for about a total of $2000 and create the same effect! (I believe you can do this on modern Windows PC's, too, although I've never had a reason to try) Or maybe even 3 20" LCD's for still much less than this thing costs. Again, "Big deal!"

    I'm sorry, but I guess I agree with a previous poster that the SGI "Reality Center" desk displays [sgi.com] are truly awesome!

  • Last I heard something was the "ultimate" if it could never be improved. Without checking I'm pretty damn sure there has been another "THIS IS THE ULTIMATE MONITOR!" article on Slashdot before. Just wait another year before a five panel wraparound flat screen, even higher resolution-per-monitor display becomes available. So Toys and or CmdrTaco, quit mangling the english language before you reach ULTIMATE zerohood.

  • Re:FOV (Score:3)

    by skoda ( 211470 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @10:46AM (#688745) Homepage
    Your phrasing suggests that our FOV is >180, but it is more like ~120 (that's full angle, not half-angle :)

    The simplest way to ballpark it is to look straight ahead, with both arms extended, index fingers extended, pointing up.

    Slowly rotate arms backward, while looking forward. When you no longer see your fingers in your peripheral vision you've found the extent of your FOV.

    Of course, this is not perfect because: 1) it's hard to keep your eyes looking straight ahead 2) since you know where your fingers are physically, I think you can fool yourself into to thinking you see them, when you're actually mentally visualizing where they are (just a hypothesis based on the past 5 min :)
    -----
    D. Fischer
  • Damn I gotta read more before I post. The Reality Center Room is pretty much exactly what that university I mentioned in a previous post had. I'm not sure the whole thing was from SGI, though. I'm pretty sure that there are other people who will build something like that for you, if you have close to a hundred grand to blow. (It just might be worth it if somebody ports Half Life and Counter-Strike to it.)
  • Man, I was doing this in 1991? with my ONE Mac Quadra 840 with three monitors playing a game called Hornet. Before they decided to move their primary development to windows (which did not support multiple heads)they had this feature where you could configure forward and side views with three monitors and the views also changed so that for instance, if you looked to the right, the right monitor now showed what was in back of you. It was Awesome. Unfortunately, they eliminated this feature when the Mac version of Hornet became a port of the Windows version.

  • The Detroit Science Center has a concave-IMAX theater. The image is a bit distorted, since the films are designed for a flat projection screen, but it's worth it for the fact that the movie extends far into your peripheral vision. The camera shots from a low-flying helicopter create a really impressive sensation of movement, since your entire field of view is covered by the screen and you have no visual reference to tell you that you're not actually moving. I can only imagine what that would be like with some 3D technology thrown in...
  • Ah, yes. I remember it like it was just last year...Wait! It was last year. We took 6 monitors, three 21" stacked (upsidedown) on three 28" HDTV and played a multi-headed Quake. MultiVisQuake.mov ~2Mb [cg2.com] We were testing our API that allows developers to create multi-headed applications. Due to GPL, we can't release the executable. But it is a cool thing to play with. With people upgrading home PCs every couple of years, it would be neat to use the old system act as a rear view mirror.
  • $22,750 retail in us dollars

    But the "consumer-grade" 2.4MP PV230 (same website) is only $9995, according to the review in the last Air & Space Smithsonian magazine.

  • Take a look at Princeton's huge hi-res display wall: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/omnimedia/ [princeton.edu]. Seems like this should transfer to LCDs.

    Of course, I just want a 12ft x 9ft display wall in my living room -- now THAT would be worth 20K.

  • ...is Mass Multiples [massmultiples.com]. I haven't put a lot of investigation into either of the two, though I wouldn't mind having either of them. :-)

    ...............
    SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name

  • Being one to do the vi-editor CTLR-z thing, I haven't got much use for even the multiple panels under X, but I'd still go for the thing just so I could fire up the Zooropa tour in my living room.

    ---------
    Once in a while you get shown the light,
  • The Mass Multiples monitors claim to support Linux (or, at least, "UNIX"). The one mentioned here supports:Apple Mac OS, HP, SGI, Sun and Windows/NT The HP, SGI, and Sun OS's are all UNIX-ish, but they never mention UNIX or Linux. And I want my Linux... :-)

    Also, several people have been debating how they would hook it up. My vote: A quad-output single video card and Xinerama (or something like that) that essentially extends the virtual desktop idea to work on multiple monitors. It would be nice to be able to scroll to the right of the screen and have my cursor actually go there. (Of course, then you might have to occasionally hunt around for it...)

    Then again, I've never used either... 8(

    ...............
    SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name

  • I thought I had seen it on here before when I saw that image of the airplane displayed on the monitor. After reading your message with the link, I instinctly clicked it to see the original article.

    Then I thought, "Hey, /. just got another ad view from me. Hmmm, in fact, they got 3 page views from me for the same story: the original, the one posted today, and back to the original to verify their screw up."

    Could this be part of the conspiracy? Could /. be doing this ON PURPOSE to get more ad revenue?

    ...or maybe not.

  • "Just slap three really nice video cards in your PC grab three of a really nice brand of "standard" LCD monitor on the market, like IBM's or Viewsonic's, put them all right next to each other (look for a brand of LCD monitor with a very slim edge around the viewable display to maximize screen display and minimize the clutter between screens) and use new new XFree86 beta with its panoramic multi-head support thingie (I forget what it's called) and get pretty much the same results.

    Let's say really nice video cards are $200/ea and really nice LCD monitors are $1200/ea, that puts you at $4000 even to do virtually the same thing this $27,000 mostrosity costs. The only difference being that you'll have three seperate pieces of monitor instead of one.

    That actually looks pretty much like what these guys did except they have a custom case they put the three seperate monitors into and built a custom connector so that you only have to plug one cable into your PC instead of three.

    If you're any good at hardware, I bet you could even take your LCD monitors out of the plastic cases and come up with some way to mount them so they would be literally right next to each other and do it for a lot less than the $23,000 difference in price between buying one of these and making one...."

    (actually, this is the text from one of three replies from the first time this was posted on /. that got a +3 score (no 4 or 5's at all). I figured if it worked then, it should work for me this time... maybe I shouldn't have said anything.)

  • I worked in a lab at NASA Ames research center that had something much like a virtual atc tower. It was a HMD setup which was fed near real time data and used an HMD with transmissive optics. The result is that the air traffic was overlayed onto the real world. The purpose is obvious: allow air traffic controllers to "see" planes even when they are obstructed by fog, rain, etc.
    Here's the site&l t;/a> [nasa.gov]

  • A Virtual Airport (Score:3)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @08:44AM (#688759) Homepage Journal
    My favorite appliation of SGI's big displays is simulated control tower that looks out over a virtual aiport [nasa.gov]. Of course, that uses rear projection, which isn't nearly as cool.

    __________

  • bigger and flatter (Score:3)

    by 5v9 ( 218313 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @08:48AM (#688760)
    How come no one's making larger flat-panel monitors by arranging smaller panels in a grid? is it just that there are few people willing to pay for something like that? or are there insurmountable technical difficulties (apparently, it can be done with 3 panels in a row; why not 2x2, 3x3 etc)?
  • LCD panels can never be photographed perfectly. Take a look at the screenshots of DOOMD (DOOM for the Digita OS cameras) [mame.net]; all of those shots were taken with a camera, so there's plenty of glare and not enough light from the screen. For this reason, companies have to insert a rendering (or a screendump) from the product and superimpose it over the screen.
  • Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...

    I prefer CRT based monitors anyway. They are more fun to drop out of a window when they get old or break. Find a local high school that's upgrading to new Windows machines (high school can be a dreadful place) and get some of their old Apple IIe's, and let the mayhem begin!

    Oh one more thing: this thing is a beauty. Too bad it probably won't have Linux drivers! You'll have to dual boot into Win2K to use it! *snicker* Somebody prove me wrong and write an open source driver as a side project, please.

  • DVDs that display a different angle on each monitor, perhaps?

    --
  • I have always wanted a wrap-around effect for gaming. Does anyone remember the cool thing you could do by networking doom between 3 computers and having each one be a different perspective? (front, left, right) That blew me away. As soon as some type of technology gets cheap, I'm buying it and changing my game field of view to 180, baby! I think that I would prefer a big scoop dish-type screen like the one that was recently posted.

  • ...........are condemned to reread it.

    http://slashdot.org/articles/99/11/04/1148246.shtm l

  • I called them and it costs... (Score:5)

    by websensei ( 84861 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @08:50AM (#688766) Journal
    $22,750 retail in us dollars
  • Make that refreshing /. and getting first posts
  • Good thing my vid card has one.
  • I went to the trouble of hooking up a second monitor so that I could spread my desktop across two screens. I have to say that it's turned out to be not so big a deal. It's generally more of a nuisance to have to swing my head around to find what I'm looking for. Except for those occasions when I really need the extra real estate (putting the Illustrator or Photoshop toolbars over on the other screen while leaving the other for the drawing is one example), I find it much more convenient to just put everything on a screen directly in my field of view. Now if I were running Flight Simulator or a game like Quake where peripheral vision and a wide field of view are beneficial, it might be a different story. But in my day-to-day work, it's a big ho-hum. For anyone contemplating a fancy screen setup, I'd say try to produce it with CRTs and see if you really like it before buying an expensive flat-panel system.
  • Oh come on.. How many people remember an article from a year ago? How many(percentage) of the current (active) readers were around a year ago? Yes, duplicating something from last week or maybe even two months ago is a screw-up but for something that was last reported over six months ago.. why not?

    I read slashdot very frequently. On a slow day I might load the front page over half a dozen times but still out of the recent duplicates I noticed only one or two. Good stories deserve to be reported more than once! (unless it has already become obsolete)

    It seems almost like someone has created a script that automatically compares a posted story to the old ones and once a match is found posts a response accusing the staff of incompetence. Grow up.. There are so many new readers that can bring new arguments to the topics. Maybe it wasn't even dealt with proprely the last time..

    "But mom, I just had ice cream six months ago? Can't I have something else? - Shut up and eat! ..or go to your room and stay there."

  • Well, multi-head in that you needed two additional machines for left and right, and a IPX network set up. Something that few could afford. By the time we had the hardware to do so, Doom was long gone.
  • Would it be cheating using it for Counter-Strike?
    --------
  • It depends on the application. The last time this was posted, we actually called the company up and check on the price for it (and the killer Wall monitors - our's is getting old). For what we do, the three angled screens is a lot more productive and realistic than the "Reality Center" would be.
  • I've been to something similar in Seattle. I believe it's called the omni-dome. Very cool... It looks like a standard movie theatre, but instead of facing the screen you sit on seats that are attached to a large cone in the center of the room. The screen is all around you. Each 1/2 of the room sees the same movie which wraps around the screen.

    You're right about those low flying camera shots... it's a strange sensation.

    I've also been to the IMAX Theatre in Spokane, WA. If you've ever seen the movie about the Explorer's in Arctic... (or was it Antacrtic??) The room becomes extreemly cold.

  • Foget figuring out why the universe is here... just get me one of these and Flight Simulator and I'll be happy.
  • It seems like you could provide some sort of magifying system on top of the joined LCD panels to provide a seemless screen - but perhaps the cost of doing that is more than really large panels!
  • The PS2 has a firewire jack. I do not yet know if you can output video through it, but you can certainly output through it - otherwise what would be the point in having it?

  • The guys on the trading floors in certain large investment banks have two LCD screens on their desks - basically similar to this thing, but with two video cards in their PC and some special software to make them act as one monitor. Let's them have the live prices and the Bloomberg sports news pages on screen at the same time (and no, I'm not joking).

    I wouldn't be surprised if these things started popping up on trading floors in the not-too-distant future.

    D.

  • Mine is way closer to 180 than 120.

    Mabe about 165. Try wiggling your fingers while you do it. when you can no longer see movement at the eges of your FOV, then you move your fingers back until you can again.
  • According to a quick search, this: article [acm.org] says that our FOV is ~200 degrees horizontally, and ~150 vertically.
  • If you read the info on it, under the 3D section is says: "(Note: the display is not suited for active or passive stereographics)"
    -------------------------------- -------------------------------
  • You know you are a linux guru when you code without monitor, and it compiles.

  • Bah. (Score:1)

    by Dwonis ( 52652 )
    I'd rather have a Kramer IMAX Monitor!
    --------
    Life is a race condition: your success or failure depends on whether you get the work done on time.
  • Perhaps you didn't notice that among the 12 "discreet" inputs of the PV290 DSK [panoramtech.com] are three standard RGB inputs. No special drivers necessary, just plug the 3 screens into three video cards and go.

    More importantly though, you shouldn't give up on the idea just because Panoram Technologies costs too much. Buy three flat screens and a sports car.
  • for DVD movies (wide screen) and gaming?

  • I was thinking in terms of eyes fixed, looking forward, but ff you allow for eye movement, then 200 full-angle FOV is believable. I glanced at the site and didn't see an explicit comment on whether they considered eye-tracking.
    -----
    D. Fischer
  • I'm still waiting for affordable Laser Projectors with VGA input, so I can project my Natalie Portman porn collection on the clouds ;)
  • Could be. I should check my optics books to find the typical value. And, like all other vision issues, it will vary from person to person. I'd gauge mine to be in the range of 120 - 160.
    -----
    D. Fischer
  • This reminds me of the DisneyWorld exhibit where you walk into a room with screens all around you. You stand there and watch this 360-degree movie of flying around the country. Makes you kinda dizzy.

    Get enough of these panels connected, and you could surround yourself. Talk about first-person shooter game immersion! When someone sneaks up behind you to shoot, they would really be behind you!
    ________________

  • And I quote:
    The Panoram PV290 DSK is an industrial grade, extreme resolution display for demanding and challenging tasks such as command and control, industrial CAD, engineering, molecular modeling, medical analysis, remote vehicle operation and a low-cost trainer display.

    Yeah, it may be designed for industrial strength but that doesn't always make it great. I have a dishwasher that has stainless steel internals as well as one of those excessively huge commercial stainless steel refridges (cafeteria type ones). And the dishwasher craps out all the time and the refridge overheats. It seems the assumption was that it's industrial and stainless steel, it must be good...

    Just because something looks cool and is industrial doesn't always mean it's what it's cracked up to be...

    Eye Candy beware...

  • Deja Vu (Score:4)

    by t-money ( 32075 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @08:26AM (#688791) Homepage
    I thought I had seen this before....

    http://slashdot.org/articles/99/11/04/1148246.shtm l [slashdot.org]
  • Hemos posted the same thing on Nov 4, 1999. link. [slashdot.org] At least they didn't post it twice over the course of a week.
  • I work on 19" and 21" monitors as well as some large flat screens on a daily basis. This would really make my life easier, except the aspect ratio looks a little wide. It looks like it would be great for equipment and security monitering, being able to see many things at once....

    -Moondog
  • Wow...I don't even want to know the price on that bad-boy!! Yipes!
    And if it were to ever break (the repair costs must be astronomical) it'd make one hell of a lounge chair, just flip that sucker on its side and throw some cushions on it!
  • Forget the aspect ratio -- It has 3 inputs. You get 3 video cards in your machine and are all set
  • three flatpanels and three video cards is probably better off, depending on how much it really costs.

    So much for flatpanels being a way of freeing deskspace :-)
  • You guys are duplicating yourselves with an alarming frequency now.

    There was an article [slashdot.org] about that company's products just under one year ago right here on Slashdot.

  • Look at this on insteed on Slashdot on the november 4, last year. [slashdot.org] it's is the same. Yes always the same. Only a graphics. It's real ? No of course ! It's made in gimp and blender to sell banner on this site.
  • Probably costs as much as a convertible

    Yeah, but you still have your heart set on it, Rob.

    Personally, I hate flat panels and Trinitron(TM) monitors. Flat panels can only handle its native resolution or a smaller one that's 1/x as big (where x is an integer). Trinitron(TM) monitors always have that dark horizontal line across the screen, about 1/4 of the way up from the bottom. Also, Sony makes a buttload of cash every time a manufacturer uses the word "Trinitron(TM)" on their monitor. This dark line often gets in the way in full-screen applications, and it is a downright nuisance in graphics applications. I like Trinitron(TM) on television sets, but it's just too useless on computer monitors.

    So, what's left for me to like? A good old, spherical CRT. I have my heart set on a 19" model with a .23 inch dot pitch (up to 1920x1440!). That should ease my eyes, as right now I have a 15" monitor on 1024x768.

  • OMFG... Add a whole new dimension to SSH login! The colors! The colors!!

  • Well, naturally!

    Of course, this would give the enemy an all-around ability to frag your puny body into a mist of blood and gore that settled slowly into the bubbling lava surrounding the narrow pathway on which you foolishly ventured, but hey. It'll look cool! :)

  • FOV (Score:1)

    by siokaos ( 107110 )
    Our FOV only extends a couple inches beyond 180degrees of our head, why have such overkill?

  • That's why you'll NEVER see a digital video output jack on a DVD player.

    The ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder does MPEG-2 acceleration and has a DFP (Digital Flat Panel DVI-I) output. Wouldn't that qualify?

    It wouldn't be illegal, anyway; it would be a contractual violation if DVD decoder licensing required manufacturers not to provide digital output.
  • It wouldn't be illegal, anyway; it would be a contractual violation if DVD decoder licensing required manufacturers not to provide digital output.

    Correction: add to the end of this statement, ", but the licensee added one anyway." A contract requiring DVD licensees not to provide digital outputs would be legal under U.S. law, but ATI seems to be evidence that no such licensing regulation exists.
  • As the site went down thanks to the HTTP Cannon, I cant check the original article, but somehow I think this is not quite targeted for home users in the first place...
  • Well, duh! Where else could you model a super wide screen 3D image than on a widescreen monitor!

    The proof is in the puddin'!

    :)

    :wq!


  • Probably costs as much as a convertible

    Actually my 96 Mazda Miata (30k miles) cost me $10k.

    This thing costs $22,750 (us dollars).

  • Just a reminder about this 38" flat panel display...

    http://slashdot.org/articles/00/02/20/1030249_F. shtml

    Not panoramic though, but they combine multiple displays similarly. However, I think that the prototype can only do 800x600 currently.

  • Lets see. I just checked outpost.com, and they're selling a factory refurbished IBM 1024/768 monitor for $89.95.

    Thats $112.38/ megapixel.

    Thats 199 megapixles for $22,750. I guess I'm going to go buy 256 of these so I can make a 16x16 grid of them on my bedroom wall.

    Now, wouldn't that be cooler?

    spreer
    (yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I don't have the hardware to drive 256 displays.)

  • >Now, wouldn't that be cooler?
    Actually, at ~100-150W/screen, I'd say it would be rather hot in there.
    --
  • The previous poster isn't talking about what's displayed on the monitors. If I remember from the last time this monitor was posted on here, the picture of the actual monitor was done as an artist's rendition, and there was nothing being displayed on the screen. What the previous poster wants to see is an actual picture of the monitor. Makes it seem more real, y'know?
  • Yup, which is as big as a 20" CRT, and many 21" CRTs... with three of them, that's not too shabby.
    --
  • Right now, I run two Samsung SyncMaster 770s (1280x1024) side-by-side on my Windows NT system--it's OK, but I'd rather be able to just by one contiguous screen.

    It's maddening to see how slowly flat (LCD) screens are improving in price/performance. Five years ago I would have predicted that in 2000 most new screen sales would be flat. Now I think that we're still 3-5 years away from that.

    Just think of the energy savings alone! (Not to mention a savings in office furniture costs--you don't need desks that are as deep with flat screens).

    --- Speaking only for myself,

  • slashdotted!
  • A couple more weeks and it will be exactly a year since the following was posted:

    My Christmas Wishlist Monitor [slashdot.org]
    Posted by Hemos on Thursday November 04, @10:50AM
    from the bigger-then-life dept.
    lawn_ornament [mailto] writes "I found something that will go to the top of my Christmas wishlist. A huge LCD monitor [panoramtech.com] and it can do about 3840 X 1024 resolution. Dimensions are 43.5 " x 11.5" - 478 sq inchs viewable. The monitor looks great and it could be yours for only $27,000. " /me wipes drool off of chin.

    --
    EFF Member #11254

  • I'm not sure what games allow you to do this, but given the space and a little bit of money you should be able to make your own cave with a couple of rented LCD projectors and a game capable of being played multiheaded.

    The last item may be the most insurmountable -- any idiot could rent a couple of projectors and most people have the wall space and the PC resources. What games support multihead like that?

  • Probably not the most cost effective way to heat the house...
  • I believe you, except that I think that the company might not release actual hardware-specific drivers for it under Linux, and if no one can write a GPL driver then all the Linux people using it will be SOL.

    Then again, who's gonna have one anyway? I'd rather get one very nice regular-sized flat screen display and a sports car for the money...
  • I'd hire ppl to go run and tell me whats on my monitor.
  • I believe the edges, or frame area, contain the connection wires to drive the LCD. So paneling LCDs may not be significantly more effective than putting standalone LCD displays side by side.


    -----
    D. Fischer
  • Speak for yourself - there is still an active DOOM community, mostly playing one of the improved variants from the source code release (check out the Legacy [newdoom.com] and the ports from Doomworld [doomworld.com]
    Although I must admit I prefer Duke Nukem 3D :+)
    --
  • I'm always suspicious of products where the 'photo' is actually a computer rendered artists impression, as the picture on the linked page clearly is.

    Is there an actual photo of the device anywhere on the site? I can't find one.

  • More Awesome Displays For UNIX Nerds (Score:5)

    by n3rd ( 111397 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @08:33AM (#688829)
    I saw these a while ago, and have just been itching to post about them.

    If you're a UNIX geek (such as myself), checkout SGI's Reality Center Walls [sgi.com]. Be sure to checkout the large images of the Reality Center Walls and Reality Center Room. They're awesome, but the price will make you toss your cookies.

    HP makes something similar, but I'm having trouble finding it again on their web page. Any idea what it's called guys (and gals)?
  • I saw one of these at a trade show earlier this year. Seriously cool and seriously expensive. I don't remember the exact price but $20,000 US seems to stick in my head. My memory could be faulty however and the price may have dropped significantly since then. Can't really say I need one but I certainly wouldn't turn my nose up at one either!
  • Now - I want one of THESE, integrated with one of these [poetictech.com] from the Ultimate Chair [slashdot.org] article the other day - I think the Aura model, with the air curculation and rotation and customizable overhead lighting... yeah... this is getting closer.

  • Personally, I hate flat panels and Trinitron? monitors.

    Trinitron monitors offer a very good contrast and a nice sharp image though.

    And my opinion is for normal pixel graphics 1600x1200 on a 21" screen is closing to the maximum, unless one does resolution-independent graphics (vectors or 3D modelling) the pixels get too small. I repeatedly need to zoom in the Gimp to see the detail, and my monitor does have a very crisp image. Getting an awfully high resolution on a screen is not always the ultimate satisfaction. On a 19" screen 1280x1024 is pretty much ideal. So if you really want to get 1600x1200 or larger resolution for screen estate, I highly suggest getting a 21" screen.

    All this from my experience in the graphic arts field, having worked on 15", 19" and 21" screens. Now there are sure going to be those of you who claim that running 1600x1200 on a 14" screen is so cool, but dude, you only have one pair of eyes for your lifetime. :) And this is just my personal opinion anyway...

  • I have less objection to a rendered simulation of screen contents being overlayed on an actual photo of the monitor itself. However, the entire image of the monitor, keyboard, mouse and monitor display is computer generated in this case.

    The contents may not be photographable (is that even a word?), but the actual monitor itself certainly is. It makes the product look like a scam if the photo is completely faked.
  • While they don't provide any resolution specs that would give it away,

    Correction: They do give it away. 3.9 megapixels which works out to three 1280x1024 flat panels. You would do much better taping together three 1600SWs (which are 1600x1024).
  • Well, the Linux world is pretty slow lately so what else is there for Linuxdot to do? They COULD have posted the latest BeOS 3D benchmarks, but they aren't Linux benchmarks are they? At least we would have had a good discussion.
  • Hmmm, the 21" FD Trinitron (the flattest CRTs available) are ~$950-1100 each. That and they take up a lot more real estate than a few flat panels (which is where the real savings comes in). The cost of this particular screen set is quite ridiculous, but the idea is good. The SGI "Reality Center" displays are an amazing thing to behold - I've been lucky enough to see one in person (can't actually afford that, either).

    Kind of like a computer chair - $80 for the chair that I used for the past couple years at home (until the welds broke), $800 for a Hermann Miller Aeron (mmmmmm). I can tell you that when I had one of those at a previous job, the cost of the chair was well worth the comfort and relief (bad back and all). Sometimes good things are worth paying for - I'd like some of my desk back from my 21" monitor...


    --
  • Or you could add to the challenge by running multiple copies of Quake III and frag yourself! I wonder if one can set it up under X to display a different virtual desktop in each panel...

    "Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
  • ...pron, right? They are always the first to use technology like this. VCR, Internet, DVD... so if you buy one soon, enjoy your pron!


    -- Don't you hate it when people comment on other people's .sigs??
  • The diag measurement is only 19 inches!

    __________

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