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3D VisWall makes scientists drool, your flat-panel weep {Engadget}
Apr 1st 2008 7:14PM FYI, the Tufts setup uses a filter & glasses system from Infitec (http://www.infitec.net/) for it's 3D.
3D VisWall makes scientists drool, your flat-panel weep {Engadget}
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
3D VisWall makes scientists drool, your flat-panel weep {Engadget}
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.
3D VisWall makes scientists drool, your flat-panel weep {Engadget}
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.
3D VisWall makes scientists drool, your flat-panel weep {Engadget}
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.
3D VisWall makes scientists drool, your flat-panel weep {Engadget}
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.
3D VisWall makes scientists drool, your flat-panel weep {Engadget}
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
