3D VisWall makes scientists drool, your flat-panel weep

Rest assured, we've witnessed quite a few astounding scientific displays set deep within university research labs, but it'd be mighty hard to cover up the $350,000 monolith residing at the Tufts University School of Engineering. The VisWall, unsurprisingly a product of Visbox, combines twin backscreen projectors and sophisticated software in order to display 3D imagery for DNA junkies and budding surgeons to swoon over. Aside from giving researchers and students alike the ability to investigate chemical structures and cellular makeups more closely, the 8- x 14-foot screen also dabbles in haptics, giving remote holders the ability to "guide the manipulation of virtual scalpels or surgical tweezers onscreen." Sheesh, it's like giving kids a reason to attend class -- imagine that.

[Via CNET]

[retro77 @ Apr 1st 2008 11:32AM]

Image Doom on that!!!!!111!!!!one!!!ONE!!!!11111~~~~

[retro77 @ Apr 1st 2008 11:32AM]

I was so excited I spilt my coffee and spelled Imagine wrong....I phail...can I get a blend please!

[Aguiluz @ Apr 1st 2008 4:09PM]

At least you did not say "first!"

[luiz @ Apr 10th 2008 12:55PM]

better crysis!! LoL

[initialxy @ Apr 1st 2008 11:34AM]

is that rendered in real-time? if so, they must have got some kick ass video card under there.

[Hero @ Apr 1st 2008 11:39AM]

I think it is a picture of the new particle accelerator being built in Switzerland I believe.

[Bruce Pennypacker @ Apr 1st 2008 12:32PM]

It's an nVidia Quadroplex. It has a total of 8 DVI outputs. 4 go to each of the two Sony SRX-r110 projectors behind the wall.

[StreetStealth @ Apr 1st 2008 1:13PM]

That's CERN's Large Hadron Collider, specifically the ATLAS Experiment part.

Seriously, "The ATLAS Experiment." Not only does the LHC look badass, it even sounds the part.

[Hero @ Apr 1st 2008 11:40AM]

I'll take 2 please.

[Ally @ Apr 1st 2008 7:29PM]

You want fries with that?

[chris fredette @ Apr 1st 2008 11:44AM]

We've had one of these at work for some 2 years. The automotive industry has been using them for much longer.
Personally doom would be great, but I think it's more of a executive toy. And for a school it's just a reason to increase the tuition or get into a popular blog.
Sure sign that Tuft's waisting someones money.

[Bruce Pennypacker @ Apr 1st 2008 12:26PM]

The money came from a grant from the National Science Foundation. The wall was inaugurated just a month or so ago and already I've heard of a mathematics professor who saw some results displayed on the wall of fractals that he'd never seen before. The resolution & size let him visually spot areas of interest that he probably never would have identified otherwise. He now has some new interesting research targets thanks entirely to this wall.

[Malina Kirn @ Apr 1st 2008 2:44PM]

I'm having a hard time understanding how it would be used for genuine scientific work, particularly for the pictured ATLAS detector. Sure, great PR to show the detector in 3D... maybe a good way to teach the incoming grads about the various parts of the detector... Is it fast enough for event display manipulation? If so, maybe you could get some real science out of it as far as ATLAS is concerned.

[Bruce Pennypacker @ Apr 1st 2008 3:38PM]

I saw one of the talks that Prof. Napier gave in which he showed these ATLAS photos. Keep in mind that the photo was taken by a newspaper photographer looking to capture something that would look good in the paper. When I saw the full demo by Prof. Napier (and others) he also showed some of the software that he uses to do analysis of data from supercolliders. The size of the display and the fact that it's 3D will let him view much more information about the particles that they're searching for with ATLAS, etc. Not being a physicist myself I couldn't provide you with specifics, but seeing representations of various particles, their orbits, etc. seems like something extremely useful.

Other research that folks at Tufts either are or plan to use the visualization wall for include fluid dynamics, simulation of quantum mechanics, and even advanced mathematics (fractals, chaos theory, etc). Go to YouTube and search for videos involving fluid dynamics and imagine being able to view those in real-time in full high resolution 3D. For researchers that sort of thing is invaluable.

If you go to the linked article you'll see a smaller photograph of Bruce Boghosian, another professor at Tufts. Behind him in that picture the wall is displaying a 3D high resolution model of the air flow of a tornado. Unfortunately it's a small photo so you can't see very much, and it's a 2D photo of a 3D video. In any event, it was rendered by the NCSA from actual data taken of a powerful tornado. I was told that after rendering the data and viewing the images the researchers spotted some behavior involving multiple twisters interacting with each other that they hadn't known about before.

You can see some stills of that tornado video here: http://access.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Stories/supertwister/page2.htm

[Aguiluz @ Apr 1st 2008 4:08PM]

"Sure sign that Tuft's waisting someones money."

Waisting?

If you meant "wasting," in a way it is.

If you meant that seriously, I wonder how you can gain pounds with cash.

[sdh @ Apr 1st 2008 11:49AM]

Kids already got a reason to attend class. Hot teachers.

[crho85 @ Apr 1st 2008 12:03PM]

Yeah, just look at the one in the picture.... meeeeeeee oowwwwwww!

[sdh @ Apr 1st 2008 12:27PM]

Well I guess that beard of his can be attractive to some if you swing that way.
He most definitely seems like a passionate man the way he does a cupping motion with his hand.

[Robobagins @ Apr 1st 2008 11:52AM]

That's the Large Hadron Collector. It'll be bringing us "Unforeseen Consequences" and killing us dead May, 2008!

Prepare to welcome your new Combine Overlords!

[Jeff W @ Apr 1st 2008 11:53AM]

Hey look, they're drawing scematics for the Millenium Falcon!

[Dan Davis @ Apr 1st 2008 11:55AM]

This reminds me of Mildred's "wall TV" in Fahrenheit 451.

Can you imagine Gran Turismo 5 on this thing?!

[Rick @ Apr 1st 2008 11:56AM]

You realize that the illustration in this post is part of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the source of the lawsuits filed in Hawaii last week?

Those guys are right, it's gotta' be some kind of a Bolshi plot to create mini black holes to lead us all to our doom. I'll bet Vlad (I am not an Impaler) Putin is behind all this.

[jon @ Apr 1st 2008 11:58AM]

i would love to use one of those in the image analysis lab... even the 30" monitor one of the researchers has is too small for some of the 2d images let alone the 5d+ montages...

[Rick @ Apr 1st 2008 12:00PM]

There is a multi-sided imaging "cave" at the Beckman Institute at the Univ of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where you can stand inside the image. Spooky for looking at DNA or protein strand structures.

Robobagins is right we will get Howard the Duck and the Dark Overlords.

[NHAnimator @ Apr 1st 2008 12:10PM]

This seems like a bad idea. Not the display itself, it seems pretty amazing. But colleges and universities paying $350,000 for a display that, if they wait a year, will sell for considerably less. Maybe a quarter mil less. Was it THAT important that Tufts buy it NOW? And how is it being paid for? Another tuition hike?

[Bruce Pennypacker @ Apr 1st 2008 12:37PM]

It was paid for with a grant from the National Science Foundation. No tuition hikes.

If you "wait a year" you'll end up waiting forever because there will always be new technology coming down the pike that you'll end up waiting for.

[NHAnimator @ Apr 1st 2008 1:28PM]

I've been waiting a year to but the PS3. I will have saved money AND will know that it doesn't suffer from any RRoD issues. I'm not "waiting forever" and will be buying one soon. No loss.

The only reason to buy something the moment it comes out is if you want/need features that are only available on that particular item and want/need them today. And you'll pay a premium for that. I was wondering aloud if Tufts NEEDED that display.

Good to hear it's being funded by the NSF. But (without knowing all of the details) I still maintain that the cost was extravagant for a univ.

[Bruce Pennypacker @ Apr 1st 2008 2:00PM]

Well think of it as any sort of capital expenditure that any major corporation makes. A top-notch hospital is going to pay for good quality MRI's so their doctors can be more successful. A high tech computer company is going to invest (hopefully) in the hardware needed by their employees to properly develop their products. Even a construction company is going to invest in earth moving equipment rather than rely on shovels. If the hospital doesn't provide the tools the doctors need then the good doctors will go to hospitals that do. If the high-tech companies don't provide the necessary tools then the good engineers will get lured away to other companies. If the construction worker isn't provided with the tools he needs then they'll go work for a construction firm that does.

Universities like Tufts are very much the same. Professors, especially those involved in advanced research, need tools like these to properly advance their research. It's not at all uncommon for universities to lure researchers and other faculty from other universities by offering facilities like these and other research tools. Many of the other well known universities in the Boston area already have visualization facilities like this, but Tufts is the newest and most powerful in the Boston area. Hopefully it will attract researchers to Tufts, which will in turn attract research grants from organizations like the NSF. Research (including the publicity, the grants that can be received, etc.) are big deals for universities, so attracting big names in various research projects is a big deal for them.

I recently heard of a professor at another university who demanded a 4,000 CPU research computing cluster that he needed to continue his research on. If the university didn't provide him with one then he'd leave for another university that could give him what he wanted. Rather than lose the researcher the university found the funding to build the computer cluster that he demanded. There wasn't anything like that involved with this visualization wall here at Tufts (as far as I know) but that can give you an idea as to how seriously universities in general view their researchers.

[Bruce Pennypacker @ Apr 1st 2008 12:21PM]

I'm one of the admins that manages this equipment. The projectors are Sony SRX-r110 projectors. The server is a white box quad-core Intel running RedHat linux w/ 16gb RAM. It's got an nvidia Quadroplex video card in it. It does render in real-time but to do things like 3-D video you need really fast I/O. We have a demo from the NCSA that's a 30-second 3-D video of the modeling of an actual tornado. The 30-second clip is 12 gigabytes in size and we copy it into RAM first to play it. There are more photos of the setup at http://sciviz.tufts.edu.

-Bruce

[farfisa @ Apr 1st 2008 12:24PM]

Says Tufts University's Dr. Napier: "We're still working on a system that will render my ponytail in real time."

[IT-Accountant @ Apr 1st 2008 12:28PM]

This is a brilliant design. I remember using three XGA LCD powerpoint projectors in a triplehead configuration to play COD4 at 3072 x 2304 (aka 15 feet by 10 feet). Since there's no bezel on a projector, the displays are totally seamless and function as one (with a bit of hacking in the case of DirectX games). This is just taking the principle to the next level.

Now, if it cost less than a ferrari....

[kal326 @ Apr 1st 2008 12:52PM]

They should invite the guy filling all the lawsuits in for a preview, "see thats a nice little 3d model of a particle accelerator....don't be shy its not going to hurt you or tear open black holes in space and doom all of mankind."

Though I wonder if you could hook it up to a flight simulator? That would be pretty entertaining.

[tk @ Apr 1st 2008 1:18PM]

I used to admin for a lab that had a large CAVE display. The funny thing was that it was never actually used for any scientific purpose. It was a big show and tell piece that was flaunted to perspective grad students. I'd love to hear what is being accomplished with this that justifies its $350,000 price.

[SNP @ Apr 1st 2008 1:23PM]

Is it me or that pic looks like the air shaft tunnel in the Death Star?

[OneLove @ Apr 1st 2008 1:24PM]

no V.D.Ho?

[IT-Accountant @ Apr 1st 2008 1:32PM]

Think of the videoconferencing possibilities... life-size, 3d, ultra-high definition... It'd be like being in the room. I bet there's at least one megacorporation that would be able and willing to pay for that kind of executive toy.

[Andrew @ Apr 1st 2008 1:43PM]

Nothing new here. The University of Illinois pioneered this type of system over 10 years ago. Look up "Cave Automated Virtual Enviroment" on any search engine or even in Youtube and you will see some examples of this type of system. Its been around for some time, sure the systems required to power this sort of thing have shrunk as PC power has increased but its essentially the same thing

[Steve @ Apr 1st 2008 3:10PM]

Wow... this is like the beginning of holodeck (from Star Trek) technology.. I didn't think that would actually be possible, yet with this, it's on its way...

[Steve @ Apr 1st 2008 3:11PM]

Also this could totally add a new level to pornos one day.... look AND feel...

[sodapop @ Apr 1st 2008 3:44PM]

I have been saying for a while they need to invent a paint that can change hues based on a electrical charge or frequency. The next logical step would be to equate surface area or molecule bundles to pixels and make digital images on the wall.

[M Burke @ Apr 1st 2008 3:56PM]

actually I'm the guy running the device. it runs on 3 standard NES systems with 3 megaflops of memory and TWO, count them, TWO flux capacitors. If you stand too close you end up in a Michael Jackson video.

[SOOPERGOOMAN @ Apr 1st 2008 4:06PM]

It looks like a UT3 map!

[josh @ Apr 1st 2008 4:42PM]

Meh... Check out the Iowa State C6 Cave... was in it a few weeks ago, frigg'n amazing: http://www.dimagemaker.com/article.php?articleID=1137

[James @ Apr 1st 2008 4:44PM]

So that's where my med school tuition went.

[J. Fryman @ Apr 1st 2008 6:28PM]

Univ. of Kentucky has a 6-projector setup just like that, sans haptics. The nice thing is that it uses a camera to detect the orientation of each projector, so as long as they are overlapping you can have as many projectors you want. The demo I saw was also Polaroid-glasses compatible for 3D amazingness.

[Bruce Pennypacker @ Apr 1st 2008 7:14PM]

FYI, the Tufts setup uses a filter & glasses system from Infitec (http://www.infitec.net/) for it's 3D.

[Mikey81 @ Apr 2nd 2008 1:27PM]

Hmm. My college has had one of these for months now, I've seen 3d images of the sun in near real-time, its awesome to see, about 6 foot across, floating in front of your eyes, with flares spewing off its surface. You still have to wear those dorky LCD specs though. We also have a 360 projector dome, you can explore star maps, zoom in, its like a planetarium on steroids. I believe the whole caboodle cost £12 million...
http://www.mechdyne.com/markets/researchEd/UWales/UWales.htm

[egokick @ Apr 3rd 2008 11:19PM]

I wonder if I can get my walls fitted with these...