I'll see your 250M pixels and raise you…

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That’s right. Given the time it takes to build these things the boys at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) obviously weren’t responding to the NASA folks, but they’ve gone and built one better.

Recall that NASA, in a fit of showboating, has built a really big power wall: 250M pixels in a gigantic tiled display that, as it turns out, they often don’t use as a single display but as an enormous cork board for fusing visual information from many sources. I’ve built big, expensive, sci-vis showboats before, and I feel I’ve been appropriately jaded by the whole experience. We did some cool, beautiful stuff that resulted in some interested graphics advancements. But very (very) little in the way of facilitating new discovery.

Image credit http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/general/07-08HIPerSpace.aspThis week Calit2 announced they’ve fired up a 287M pixel version of the same kind of thing — story at TechRadar.com (reader Paul Adams also pointed me to the story at UCSD’s web site). Useless fact

The Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Space (HIPerSpace) features nearly 287 million pixels of screen resolution – more than one active pixel for every U.S. citizen, based on the 2000 Census.

Ah me.

Ok fellas. You have some big displays. Now let’s see a couple million dollars worth of new discoveries from, you know, actual scientists doing actual work. Or how about just a dozen, non-dollar denominated discoveries of any sort? Prove my jaded-ness to be completely misplaced. Please.

[Image credit UCSD.]

Comments

  1. David Cuccia says

    “Ok fellas. You have some big displays. Now let’s see a couple million dollars worth of new discoveries from, you know, actual scientists doing actual work. Or how about just a dozen, non-dollar denominated discoveries of any sort? Prove my jaded-ness to be completely misplaced. Please.”

    Hear hear!!