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Displays

140" Monitor Demonstration At Purdue 238

michaelpapet.com writes "Edward J. Delp, a researcher at Purdue University is working with Philips to make a monster 140" monitor using 4 projectors on a single screen. Article claims it would be good for National Security... I dunno, I see this being the only way to satisfy 'big screen envy.'"
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140" Monitor Demonstration At Purdue

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  • by dsbaha ( 798669 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @07:46PM (#9865726)
    Life size P0rn, here I COME!!!
    wait, that didn't sound right.
  • gaming (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Apage43 ( 708800 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @07:47PM (#9865732) Homepage
    I have got to play Half-Life on this thing...
    • Re:gaming (Score:3, Interesting)

      Actually, flight sims on a big screen are very cool, too.
  • by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Monday August 02, 2004 @07:47PM (#9865733)
    It's a projection screen. You could always make those as big as you want based on pure optics.

    However, that's not the tech advance anyway. What they're really showing off is the way to get multiple projectors to work together so that you end up with four times the projection area and also four times the resolution while using relatively off-the-shelf projectors, and avoiding the seam effect that would happen if you tried to do this yourself.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      yeah, so its not really as cool as Frank's 2000 inch TV.
    • why is tiling 4 projectors together newsworthy?

      i can tile 2 projectors together with my matrox dualhead display .. 4 doesn't seem to far fetched or newsworthy really.

      its like that guy who stitched together 190+ pictures from his digital camera and claims he broke the 1 gigapixel barrier ...

      taking pieces of smaller images - whether they be projected or not - and stitching them together into someting bigger has been commonplace on the backs of trading cards for years ..
    • by Anonymous Coward
      this is nothing new. This type of thing has been done a several Universities before, and numerous national labs.

      e.g.:

      http://www.cs.unc.edu/Research/stc/Projects/pixe lf lex.html
      http://www.cs.princeton.edu/omnimedia/
      http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/~judson/projects/activ emural/images.html ...

    • The university I work for just bought a couple of Panasonic DLP projectors that support image blending. Big deal. You can do this with off-the-shelf components, so I'm not sure why it's such a big deal.
    • if you read the article they note that this is the first such projector to make that there are no seams between projection screens.
  • DPI (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Apage43 ( 708800 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @07:53PM (#9865765) Homepage
    Okay, it's a BIG projection screen, but, what kinda DPI does it get?
    I've seen these things that 'Make a big-screen dvd player', that are simply a lens you put over a portable dvd player's LCD screen, which doesn't have high enough DPI to account for such a big screen. is it extra blocky or is it at like 1200000x102400000 resolution? (And if so how many FPS can it get on... say, anything?
    • Re:DPI (Score:4, Informative)

      by stripmarkup ( 629598 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @08:03PM (#9865807) Homepage
      The article sheds no light on this:

      Innovative software allows the four separate projections to be blended together so that no seams are seen between adjacent segments, joining the four images into a single picture with higher resolution than regular television sets.

      Wow! Higher resolution than regular television sets. Even 800x600 would qualify.
      • Horizontally, television has an analogue signal. How would you quantify that?
        • Horizontally, television has an analogue signal. How would you quantify that?

          I'd quantify it as 720 luminance samples and 360 chrominance samples per line; effectively 720 pixels with 4:2:2 sampling. Perfectly in line with CCIR-601, or as its known, ITU-R Recommendation BT.601-5 (10/95) (AKA "broadcast quality")

          (Note that "analogue" does not imply infinite definition; CCIR-604 specifies certain bandwidth and signal-to-noise requirements, including maximum deviation; digital source material is better qual
    • Re:DPI (Score:3, Informative)

      by Pieroxy ( 222434 )
      Well, even from the story you can get some clues. This is aggregating 4 projectors. So I'd say that a hi-end projector being approx 1920x1024, the final resolution must be around 3840x2048, which is more than enough to watch a video - since that's what you're referring to.

      Think that the first digital theater projector that TI demoed in france was running at 1280x960 (not sure about the vert. reso.) pixels.

      So I guess there's no need to rant over there after all.
      • Re:DPI (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Methuseus ( 468642 )
        There's a problem there. The story seems to say that the projectors used are regular, off the shelf products. In that case the likely resolution each would have would be 1024x768, or even as low as 800x600. The 1920x1024 that you are quoting is an extremely high resolution for the average projector.

        They also state that it has "higher resolution than a TV". That merely means that the image, as a whole, is at least 800x600. That's not very high res. Also, the pictures they display are reminiscent of a projec
  • by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Monday August 02, 2004 @07:53PM (#9865767)
    This tech is only being billed for a national security use because that's where the government wasteful spending is these days. If everybody was concerned about hurricanes for some strange reason, then this tech would be sold for its weather uses.

    This monitor can only display a super-high-res security camera image if a super-high-res camera was installed too... and that resolution on a map would be wasted if they don't have a different datapoint for each pixel. I'm putting this one under "cool tech without any real use".
    • Ok, get a clue!

      Next thing you should do, is take a marketing claass. Its so obvious they are trying to attract investors, and if there is ANY chance at all that they get government funding for their project, they would be stupid not to persue it. That is also the reason why "national Security" is an overused buzzword, as you put it.

      1. Come up with some useless idea
      2. Examin government for current spending pattern
      3. Listen to CNN for 5 minutes to find buzzword
      4. ...
      5. Profit!
    • by Kludge ( 13653 )
      You obviously know nothing about security. Everyone knows that terrorists will never attack us once they see our great, big ... computer displays.
    • This tech is only being billed for a national security use because that's where the government wasteful spending is these days. If everybody was concerned about hurricanes for some strange reason, then this tech would be sold for its weather uses.

      Indeed, but once you understand that, you might as well buy into the system. Politicians aren't sentient as such, they just twitch occasionally under particular triggers, and National Security is of course a key positive trigger.

      While one's at it, one might as
    • They don't want it for security camera footage. They want it for satellite imagry. "Homeland security" is a bit of a misnomer. Intelligence agencies would be a better fit. Basicly anywhere where you have digital images of insane resolution.
  • by catscan2000 ( 211521 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @07:57PM (#9865783)
    "I'm gonna get one of my own real soon.

    It's like
    having a drive-in movie
    in your own living room."

    I couldn't resist ;-).

    (Weird Al reference)
    • I'm gonna get one of my own real soon.

      Before I finished reading the headline to her my wife interrupted to say 'you are not getting one.'

      140" is only 12' which in widescreen would make it 10.6' by 5' which is not all that large for a cinema screen. There have been digital projectors that size for ages. But I suspect that the screen is actually academy ratio so it would be 9' x 7'

      Yes this hack is cheaper but I saw it 7 years ago when Tom Knight did it at MIT.

      As far as the resolution goes anything ove

  • Imagine The Blue Screen of Death on that! Scary...
  • Even Bigger (Score:5, Informative)

    by Oculus Habent ( 562837 ) * <oculus DOT habent AT gmail DOT com> on Monday August 02, 2004 @08:01PM (#9865793) Journal
    Check out Panoram Technologies [panoramtech.com] for established systems. I'm pretty sure [panoramtech.com] they cater to military applications [panoramtech.com].

    • I looked at a link at Panoram Technologies for the WNBC newsroom backdrop [panoramtech.com]. After reading about a $450,000 system to put a 26 foot screen behind the news desk I was left wondering why didn't they just use a high quality chromakey [wikipedia.org] or bluescreen [wikipedia.org] system? They are getting much better at it now: almost completely seamless and it would be much more flexible.
  • National Security (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Daniel ( 1678 ) <dburrows AT debian DOT org> on Monday August 02, 2004 @08:02PM (#9865801)
    Article claims it would be good for National Security... I dunno

    What you fail to realize is that it's spelled "National Security", but it's pronounced "GRANT FUNDING".

    Daniel
  • by mikevdg ( 579538 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @08:03PM (#9865805)

    Same thing again, but with twice as many projectors:



    http://www.cs.vu. nl/pics/F3_big.jpg

    • or this one ... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by pavon ( 30274 )
      at sandia labs [sandia.gov] with 4x the projectors. I don't think they have a cool algorithm for the seam matching, like the one in the story though. The neat thing about the sandia one system was what was feeding it - a 64 node cluster that could render realtime 3d visualizations of simulations done on the ASCI super computers. I don't know what the polygon count was on that thing but each projector was 1280x1024 and I couldn't see any corners when looking at a very detailed model (the one shown in the press release
  • by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Monday August 02, 2004 @08:03PM (#9865812)
    This particular display also includes a computer, which runs an algorithm that gets rid of overlapping regions between adjacent projections, eliminating the seams in the process.

    There you go. Take four projectors and let them overlap a little. Then, you pixel-row by row eliminate the overlaps by not moving the projectors, but simply feeding the projector black lines in the places where you don't want it to do any work. When you've assured that there's no point on the screen being served by two projectors, you've also lowered the seam area to less than the width of a pixel on the screen.
    • hook this up to a little webcam and go over the seams slowly, and the computer can do all the adjustment automatically... it can recogonize what part of the seam it's on by projecting a test pattern, then it can figure out the overlap. It might even then paint the de-seamed area a different color so you know that part is done.

      I wonder if they do what ink jet printers do... not make it an absolute seam, but a blurry seam, slowly blending from one projector to another over the space of a few inches. The arti
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @08:04PM (#9865815)
    We, the loyal readers of Slashdot, know that there is a problem with Slashdot. Lately, we have been receiving tons of 503 and 500 errors (and "Nothing to see here", as well). Slashdot has also been extremely slow during this time on many occasions. We demand to know what is going on. What is wrong? What is being done to fix it? Or are you just going to bitchslap this thread and try to hide the problem (security through obscurity)? We aren't unreasonable; we just want to know the truth. I think we deserve it.

    Thank you.
  • And if you are not old enough to recognize that, and do not even know who Lowell Thomas was, take a look at this site. [widescreenmuseum.com]
  • Get a dual-head videocard, IE Matrox or ATI to name a few, and hook up two XGA 4/3 projectors up to it. Line up carefully, and you can watch an anamorphic 2.35:1 dvd @ 1805x768 with black bars on the SIDES instead of the top. Pretty sweet.

    Doesn't seem hard to do four this way. Their setup is rear projection, which is a bit harder of course. And the article says it's running near 16/9 aspect.
  • A screen that doesn't allow private viewing for up to a mile away...
    ... which is still more secure than any unpatched Windows installation.
  • Good for nat'l security?!? You mean like a really big screen where they can tell us everything is fine and that we will blind the terrorists with their own confusion?

    Just one question, is the chick with the hammer seeing anoyne?
  • by deragon ( 112986 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @08:31PM (#9865924) Homepage Journal
    And since current desktops are not vector based, desktop icons are ridiculously minuscules and increasing the fonts up to 1000% causes text to fail fitting within the widgets boundaries.

    I want a fully vector based desktop, on Linux, and I want it adopted by the major distributions as the default. I know that their are some vector based desktop, but they are not usefull since they are not widely deployed and apps are not coded for them.

    I want to be able to program and specify that Widget B is 70% the size of Widget a, and the window is by default 12 cm wide or 50% of the width of the desktop (user configurable).

    I hate specifying in pixels. They are not the same on different display devices.
    • I want a fully vector based desktop, on Linux, and I want it adopted by the major distributions as the default. I know that their are some vector based desktop, but they are not usefull since they are not widely deployed and apps are not coded for them.

      Get a Mac. Honestly. Get a Mac. It's BSD based, and Quartz uses Display PDF. It's everything you want, and it's available now. Either that, or track yourself down a copy of NextStep that used Display Postscript.
    • I hate specifying in pixels. They are not the same on different display devices.

      Using cm isn't a perfect solution, either. I had told X that my second head (my TV) was 32". Well-written apps went ahead and scaled properly to render 12 point text to be 12 points high, which I could not hope to read from my couch. I ended up telling X that I have a 15.5 cm wide display, which is the size of a monitor of the same viewing arc at arm's length.

      Sure, it's only a problem in unusual cases-- such as the display

  • resolution??? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Fuzzums ( 250400 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @08:35PM (#9865949) Homepage
    " ...joining the four images into a single picture with higher resolution than regular television sets. "

    DUH!! My 17" monitor already has a higher resolution than my tv-set!
  • Doom 3 comes out, 140" monitor demo.. /me changes his pants. Repeatedly.
  • you can buy these on ebay [ebay.com] for eight bucks.

    Oh wait...
  • by Animats ( 122034 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @08:37PM (#9865964) Homepage
    The question is whether this self-aligns all the projectors. If it does, it's a step forward. If it doesn't, it's Yet Another Mosaic Display With Alignment Headaches.

    Self-alignment is quite feasible today, because you can get multi-megapixel cameras. Or you could aim a cheap webcam at each join point. Somehow you've got to get high-resolution images of the join points. Then alignment is a straightforward process, if you get to project test patterns.

    For a production product, it would make sense to put a cheap camera in each projector, looking at the screen. Doesn't even have to be color. Some CRT-based projectors have this now, for auto-convergence. Then you could just aim a few projectors at the screen, get them roughly aligned, and let the software do the setup. This could even work for LAN parties.

  • I got about 1/3 through the article but I had to open the door cause it was gettin too thick in here. I wonder if the projectors they use are going to be near as good as this one. [projectorcentral.com]
  • by dlleigh ( 313922 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @08:37PM (#9865967)
    Check out these. The Guinness Book of World Records claims that the one at the Hong Kong race track is the world's longest TV screen.

    DiamondVision installations [mitsubishielectric.com]

  • by Aidtopia ( 667351 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @08:41PM (#9865986) Homepage Journal

    I'd hardly call this "innovative" or even label it as a "technology." It's a standard multi-image slide show trick that probably goes back at least to the 1960s. (It was old hat when I did it in 1989.) It has been done with movie projection and is routinely done with video projection (see Dataton WatchOut [dataton.com]).

    The trick is to have some overlap between the projection areas, and to use complementary gradient filters at the overlapping edges. The gradient filters can hide seams that even the slightest misalignment would cause.

    There was a graduate student (at CMU?) who made a nifty program that could compensate for alignment problems. The projectors could be crudely aligned, then grids were displayed on each one. A PC cam captured the grids, computed the offset, tilt, and keystoning. From that information a reverse transform was applied to each projector's output, and you got a remarkably well aligned multi-projector image. Very impressive, since the cam was obviously much lower in resolution than the composite image.

    Multi-projector techniques are even more important with video than they were with slides, since the light output of video projectors is so much lower. To throw a big image, combining multiple projectors is the most practical option.

    • by dlleigh ( 313922 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @08:48PM (#9866011)
      Projector Mosaic [merl.com]

      The technique is fast and the results are impressive.

    • Modern video projectors are much, much brighter than 35 mm slide projectors ever were. You can get a couple of thousand lumens out of a box you can fit in your briefcase, and the large venue projectors toss out 17,000 lumens or so. Even a "medium" projector will embarrass any normal slide projector you can name, and gives the monster transparency machines a run for their money (think overhead projector films with a honking big light source and a large lens).

      As others have mentioned, the Dataton system ma

  • 6.7 feet high still seems inadequate for several Doom3 monsters.
  • who read that headline as 14" Monitor Demo? I read that and thought, "Big Deal - I have a couple of those crappy things sitting unused on a shelf in the garage". Heck, these probably wouldn't even fit in my garage with all the other junk in there...

    Guess I need new glasses.
  • But the question is, how well will Doom 3 look on it?
  • by baigeman ( 802270 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @08:54PM (#9866060)
    This setup is cool, however a less covered display is Purdue's 24 projector stereoscopic tiled display wall that i spent a year designing and building through the Envision Center at Purdue. This was built from 24 projectors in 12 tiles, with a custom designed and built frame. There was no software used to align the projectors, just me and an alignment system aligning everything by hand. There are a lot of universities and centers building tiled displays, it is much harder to try and build one in stereo(two projectors per tile, one projector for each eye. This is coupled with polarizations filters and glasses so that the right eye only gets the 12 right eye projectors, and the left eye gets the 12 let eye projectors. The stereoscopic settings are controlled with the software and the quad buffer stereo built into nvidia graphics cards.) -Jim Bartek bartek@purdue.edu
  • I'm glad my alma matter is hard at work solving the world's most pressing issues.
  • Yes! (Score:4, Funny)

    by blackmonday ( 607916 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @09:39PM (#9866222) Homepage
    That would make for a killer game of minesweeper!

  • ... there's no door in the house large enough to squeeze it through.

    I guess I'll have to play life-sized doom3 in the garage...

  • Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room! ...unless it's a DOOM 3 deathmatch you're talking about, of course.
  • TeleSuite [telesuite.com] already has a 4 screen monitor / display unit, 2048 by 480 pixels, and 16 by 3 feet, as part of the 400 series tele-immersion system. This uses NTT projectors and a one throw back-projection system.

    Standard use includes 4 scalars to make the display overlap seamlessly and IP multicast transport using multiple video groups.

    It's not built for national security, but it does do a good job with telepresence.
  • This is not news (Score:5, Informative)

    by pagz ( 699545 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @10:44PM (#9866415) Homepage
    I'm a little late to this thread but this is definately not news...two years ago I was working for PPPL (www.pppl.gov) and we had 12 projectors tiled together to form one large display. Princeton U. main campus had 24 I believe. I've also worked on the Rutgers U. Engineering has one that tiles 9 together.

    Here's how it works. The RU and the PPPL walls were powered by a linux cluster, one machine per projector with a high end graphics card in it (Yes I played Unreal Tournament on it...it was damn nice). How does Unreal work on it? At the time we were using a project called WireGL which intercepts OpenGL calls on the master machine (or whatever machine is running the program) then splits them up across the Myrinet network to the machine that will render the image on it's section of projector. This project was run out of Standford while the new version of the project is called Chromium is now located out of UVA. This projects also not only split up the image but allow for pixal overlap so that the image appears "seamless".

    Yes I've also seen parts of the Matrix on the PPPL wall as a coworkers project was to write a parrallel MPG player for use on the wall, as this was a summer fellowship project he did not have much time to complete it and took a basic approach to it which was preprocess the mpg to split it into the configuration then using a modified mplayer I believe it was added networking code to syncronize the images, sound was not completed during the summer.

    Princeton U's cluster was a windows cluster which needed custom video drivers to power their wall but otherwise it was the same principal (when I left Princeton U was supposed to be moving the cluster over to linux).

    From skimming the questions in this thread I believe I've answer all but the DPI question...and that ends up being you do not have a pixalated display, infact at PPPL before we scaled up to 12 projects (the number of them when I left there atleast) the wall was a 7 Megapixal display and we found images taken with a 7 megapixal camara...they look simple stunning, in one image you were able to see finishing nails driven into a table cloth to keep it down.

    Anyway I hope that answers everyone's technical questions.

    Cheers :-)
    • Re:This is not news (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mikeage ( 119105 )
      Pagz, check below for Marques's (remember him?) comment and my response. Also note that the 12 projector wall is 9 megapixels (4096x2304), and we did have 9MP images, both CG and real. Craig's player was cute but primative... the reason that design was chosen was bandwidth-- if you want 9 megapixel animation at 24bps, you have 27 MBps of raw data... which is quite stressful on the network and the PCI bus.
  • Hell, I've got an old NEC CRT projector out in my garage (you know, the ones with three seperate lenses). It can be adjusted to go anywhere from a 60" screen to a 300" screen. Its 1280x1024, so I'm sure at a 300" screen that would be shitty dpi...but still, this really isn't shocking news.

    And I don't see what it has to do with fucking national security, I guess thats the latest excuse to get massive amounts of government money to buy projectors.
  • Article claims it would be good for National Security...

    I'm pretty sure that however much a 12-foot monitor costs, the money could be much better spent on funding homeland security efforts in our cities [herald-mail.com].
    • Terrorist! Do you want Al Queda to blow something else up? Are you working for Bin Laden? THEN YOU WILL pay for our gigantic screens which will be used to monitor your safety in the shower!

      *gives long congress-like speech on how I'm related to someone who's sister's uncle's room-mate once talked to a guy who died somewhere near the WTC explosion*

      Yes that's right, I went there.
  • I have a contract with these guys [christiedigital.com] and I am building software that can...
    oh, wait, I can disclose it :)

  • PPPL's display wall [displague.com] is 15 feet across, with 9 1024x768 projectors. More pictures and info are available in Mike Age's PPPL Display Wall presentation [mikeage.net].
    • Please don't slashdot this site (mikeage is mine).
      I have low bandwidth, and if this takes up too much space, I will have to take it down. Instead, try the google cache [216.239.59.104].

      Note that Marques is wrong here... it's now 12 projectors, 4x3 (so we have a net effect of a widescreen) of 4096x2304. And yes, it does run Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament, though I don't have any good pics handy.

      On another note, it's mikeage, or Mikeage, not Mike Age. Goes back to high school... thanks Elie Klein.
  • then ask yourself: what are the minimum doom 3 system requirements?
  • by den_erpel ( 140080 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @01:16AM (#9867062) Homepage Journal
    I have seen such screens on a daily basis [barco.com], I do not see what is so interesting about this "research"... This is just a new player trying to play catchup, that's all...

    If you go to the site, you can even see some existing installations (network video and all).

    Nothing to see, move along...
  • Anyone else at Purdue know where they've got this set up? I wouldn't mind "getting lost" and finding my way into there before the rush of undergrads back to campus.
  • Gen. Buck Turgidson: Ahh, am I to understand the Russian Ambassador is to be admitted entrance to the War Room?

    President Muffley: That is correct. He is here on my orders.

    Turgidson: I... I don't know exactly how to put this, sir, but are you aware of what a serious breach of security that would be? I mean... begins closing his notebooks he'll see everything. He'll see the big board!

    ...all 140 inches of it.
  • These people in the picture are pointing to the capitol or something! Arrest them! They must be terrorists!
  • Why would the national security people want to monitor Vatican City! Strange demo image
  • By putting one in every town with an image of our leader telling us what to do?

    But really how much of a help in national security it is. It would be just stupid to say if only in 2001 we had a 140" high res display then 9/11 wouldn't happen. Besides the way they show the screen on the picture they can only see the lower end of it. Thus wasting the need for high res in the rest of the screen. Is there going to be a platform that can make you travel to the screen. This is just a waist of my money and it
  • I've wondered for a while whether it might be possible to actually overlay four projectors. Rather than an overlapping mosaic of four images, you'd aim all four projectors at the same spot and align them such that each projector filled the gaps between the others' pixels.

    So rather than:

    AABB
    AABB
    CCDD
    CCDD

    you'd have

    ABAB
    CDCD
    ABAB
    CDCD

    I'd think that this might be more difficult than a simple overlapping mosaic, because you'd have to have consistent geometry across the entire image (rat

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