The highest-resolution immersive visualization facility ever built
November 21, 2012
Image of Dubai, United Arab Emirates viewed in the Reality Deck (credit: SBU)
Stony Brook University (SBU) recently unveiled its new Reality Deck, with 1.5 billion pixels total on 416 super-high-resolution screens in a four-walled surround-view theater — the highest-resolution immersive display ever built — and driven by a 220 TFLOPs graphic supercomputer.
Its purpose and primary design principle is to enable scientists, engineers, and physicians to tackle current problems that require the visualization of vast amounts of data.
The Reality Deck is the first to break the one-gigapixel (one-billion-pixels) mark, with a resolution five times higher than the second largest in the world.
“This technology will be used for visualizing and analyzing big data, such as advanced medical imaging, protein visualization, nanotechnology, astronomical exploration, micro-tomography, architectural design, reconnaissance, satellite imaging, security, defense, detecting suspicious persons in a crowd, news and blog analyses, and climate and weather modeling. It will also be used for storm-surge mapping to fight flood disasters, such as superstorm Sandy and global warming,” said Project Director, Arie E. Kaufman, PhD, Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department and Chief Scientist at the University’s Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology (CEWIT).
In the Reality Deck, data is displayed with an unprecedented amount of resolution that provides 20/20 vision, and renders traditional panning or zooming motions obsolete, as users just have to walk up to a display in order to resolve the minutiae, while walking back to appreciate the context that completely surrounds them.
Dr. Kaufman added, “We’ve never had a way to analyze and display tremendous amounts of data at one time before. This is revolutionary for visual analytics, which is the most powerful and critically important analyses.”
Another feature of the Reality Deck is the “infinite canvas,” a 360-degree smart screen that changes images according to the location of the viewer walking around the Reality Deck, so the same image is never viewed twice and infinitely big data can be explored. It also has a high-performance sound system with 22 speakers and four subwoofers. Future applications to stream video in real time are also in the works.
Images displayed at the demonstration included water level mapping for storm surge due to extreme weather events, satellite imagery of New York City and parts of Long Island that demonstrated a next-generation Google map, the 2008 Presidential inauguration, Milky Way visualization from NASA and the European Southern Observatory, and protein visualizations of the E. coli bacteria.
”The Reality Deck will spur medical breakthroughs, groundbreaking new technologies and greater partnerships with industry that will help to create new jobs,” said Yacov Shamash, Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Vice President of Economic Development at Stony Brook University. “
The Reality Deck was constructed with a $1.4 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant and a $600,000 match from Stony Brook University.
Comments (15)
by Walter
Why showing the picture and videoclip? There’s no pc that can render the graphics accurately.
by Editor
Dude, you totally nailed me for passing off my 121,203 pixels image as a 1.5 billion pixels image! OK, I confess, those images of galaxies on our website? Not real images of the universe either, just totally fake little jpegs! In fact, we just make up all this stuff, but you saw through it! :)
by Paul
What a waste of time and money!
I am yet to read anything that has been achieved because of those super resolution displays. Can anyone explain how throwing billions of pixels in a screen help in any of the fields listed in this article?
Cool? yes, but totally useless for science.
by DrDubious
I guess it’s OK if you like looking at the world through a wire fence.
by Dan Robinson
Why is this considered better in principle than a modernized version of the “virtual reality’ headset I tried about twenty years ago? Perhaps better than this, I could look in any direction and see new detail, though at a lower resolution. I thought it was a real waste, since the “best” I could do was “kill” the other person before he killed me, and before an ancient bird came and snatched me away.
by Editor
Good points. Main benefit is a highly interactive shared exploration/discussion/planning space (and PR value), but that same functionality, including the 1.5 Gpix display (an interactive version), could be achieved in theory with an enhanced* Oculus RIFT (http://www.kurzweilai.net/why-immersive-virtual-reality-is-the-next-generation-of-gaming-part-2 and http://www.oculusvr.com/ ) with an MMORPG architecture and Kinect/Leap control in an Oblong-type shared environment (http://www.kurzweilai.net/minority-report-arrives-with-oblong-part-ii-mind-blowing-ui) at lower cost and not restricted to one room — in fact, feasible globally via machine translation (http://www.kurzweilai.net/speech-recognition-breakthrough-for-the-spoken-translated-word) and local clones of the imagery and darknet shared DB (access to Internet2 via 100 Gbps lines would also be nice). Extra points for automated POV display based on head, eye, hand, and body-motion tracking and automated EEG-based control and double points for automated mind reading (http://www.kurzweilai.net/neuroscience-the-mind-reader) tied to an NLP/semantic web DB.
* “Imagine an HMD with a massive field of view and more pixels than 1080p per eye, wireless PC link, built-in absolute head and hand/weapon/wand positioning, and native integration with some (if not all) of the major game engines, all for less than $1,000 USD,” Palmer says. “That can happen in 2013!” (http://www.kurzweilai.net/why-immersive-virtual-reality-is-the-next-generation-of-gaming-part-2)
by Gabor
Are they watching “Avatar” in lunch time?!?
by Vin
Hey get out of the way, can’t see :D
by e.s. gravois
Can the Star Trek holodeck be far behind?
by roy
The price will drop rapidly. I was around when they spent untold millions on a single computer the size of a basement, and all it could do effectively was tabulate insurance statistics or some other mundane work. Now look. We carry a larger computer in our cell phones. Soon, every home will have an “immersion room” theater. What a kick. Just hope I’m around to see it happen.
by asiwel
I wonder why in the world they built this while leaving the black rectangle frames around what looks to be each monitor screen? Why would they have left such a distraction in what otherwise must be a fantastic environment?
by asiwel
I remember how effective the “Reflections of China” “Circle-Vision” pavillion (and 13-minute, 360-degree film travelog) was years ago at Epcot Center at Disney World … and surely it is even better today. “Reality decks” like this one have so much potential for interactive visualization, exploration, and learning .. as well as for research purposes, etc. They are 21st century planetariums.
by Timothy
The frames are necessary. Even the best current technology requires someplace for the connections to address and power the pixels from top and sides–about a half-inch all the way around. When you butt two screens together you get a 1-inch border. I expect this will improve fairly quickly with the flexible displays that are under development.
by Ron
The screens could be placed the depth of the display further or nearer relative to the observer, and that 1/2 inch could be offset. Totally eliminates the border. From several feet, this arrangement would be much less intrusive. Not perfect, but better than this.
by Bri
Two million bucks!! Not bad! I’ll take one for my house. Ohhh to be a billionaire.