100 Million Pixels of Virtual Reality 190
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."
"/."-hype? (Score:1, Interesting)
At least ISU is spending wisely (Score:2, Interesting)
This looks really good, but also such a waste (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
RealityLens (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:This looks really good, but also such a waste (Score:3, Interesting)
How about it's great for having more than one person in there and you can point at a spot and keep talking. With googles you'd both have to be wearing them and you'd have to describe to the other person the point you are looking at.
At least that's what I thought of.
Re:One last lame post (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This looks really good, but also such a waste (Score:4, Interesting)