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HIPerSpace monitor wall makes a great Grand Theft Auto IV canvas
Rolling around jacking up innocents and tossing Molotov cocktails is pretty enthralling on your vanilla 46-inch HDTV, but can you even imagine the rush of swiping a hot dog, burning out in someone else's whip and then snagging a new pair of kicks on this? Researchers (and gamers, obviously) down at UC San Diego have re-engineered their middleware to enable such masterpieces as this to be played on the big monolithic HIPerSpace screen, and needless to say, we can't imagine much real work getting done with this new functionality coming to light. Head on down to the gallery to see what you're missing -- science, research and 4.0 GPAs are such beautiful things. %Gallery-22388%
Gizmo bot is here to help
With a cute name like that you wouldn't expect this Gizmo robot to be so bent on risky reconnaissance missions, but that's what creator Javier Rodriguez Molina has in mind for his modular progeny. Gizmo is designed to gather information at disaster sites and relay it to whoever however, be that over wireless internet, cellular, Bluetooth or other means. Multiple bots can network together to collaborate, but while the current version of the bot is mostly a glorified remote control rover, future versions will carry all sorts of sensors and come in all sorts of form factors. Research is ongoing at San Diego's "Calit2," and the hope is for the final bot to come in under the $1,000 price point to make it easy for police, fire departments and other rescue organizations to buy the bots off the shelf.
HIPerSpace visualization system takes the crown with 220 million pixels
For AV freaks enamored with their own HDTV and hardcore gamers who doubt anyone's ability to unleash more graphical firepower than that found in their rig, prepare to be humbled. As part of the HIPerSpace visualization system, engineers at the University of California, San Diego "have constructed the highest-resolution computer display in the world, with a screen resolution of up to 220 million pixels." The system, which links between UCSD and UC-Irvine (responsible for the mighty HiPerWall) via dedicated optical networking, contains a "graphics super cluster" that relies on 80 NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 GPUs. Reportedly, scientists dealing with large-scale applications involving "Earth sciences, climate prediction, biomedical engineering, genomics, and brain imaging" will be able to make use of the newfangled setup in order to better digest the information they're dealing with. Sheesh, all we want is a solid day with this thing, infinite Doritos, and Halo 3.[Via MedGadget]
UCSD's Squirrel puts pollution monitoring on your mobile
Giving an animal a phone to tote around and monitor pollution is one thing, but hooking up a critter to your cellphone sans wires sounds like a much more viable solution to keeping track of filthy surroundings. UC San Diego's Squirrel -- which sounds an awful lot like a project UC Berkeley was working on -- is a Bluetooth-enabled, palm-sized sensor that currently measures carbon monoxide and ozone, but eventually will be able to "sample nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide in the air, as well as temperature, barometric pressure, and humidity." After sampling, the device then utilizes a software application dubbed Acorn to allow the user to "see the current pollution alerts through a screensaver on the cellphone's display." Furthermore, the program can periodically upload the captured data to a public database operated by the "California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), which is funding Squirrel's development." Of course, cleaning up the mess that these monitors will inevitably find is an entirely different matter.[Via MedGadget]
UC Irvine's monster HIPerWall monitor
Just when we were feeling superior with our triple monitor setup, the techies at UC Irvine's Calit2 Center of GRAVITY (Graphics, Visualization and Imaging Technology) had to go and show us up with not a four, not a five, but a 50 display Frankenmonitor powered by 25 Power Mac G5s (each loaded with 2GB of RAM) supported by the team's proprietary tiling software. And these aren't any regular old monitors, mind you; they are Apple's top-of-the-line 30-inch Cinema Displays maxed-out at 2560 x 1600 resolution. To save you a trip to the calculator, the HIPerWall (for Highly Interactive Parallelized display) measures 192-inches diagonally and sports a maximum resolution of 25,600 x 8000-so although this enormous setup was designed with medical, meteorological, and military uses in mind, all we can think about is the number of Dashboard widgets we could cram in. [Via TUAW]
