ABOUT / HARDWARE
A description of the hardware developed and deployed in relation to the SIO Visualization Center.
Highly Immersive Visualization Environment (HIVE)
The Highly Immersive Visualization Environment (HIVE) is a cylindrical wall display 28 feet wide and 8 feet tall installed in the Revelle Conference Room to provide immersive exploration capabilities to large groups of researchers (upto 50 people can be accommodated in the room). A 16 processor SGI Onyx 3400 drives three front mounted projectors that display on the Panoram GVR120E for a fully immersive environment.
Besides the SGI Onyx, the HIVE can also use a Windows PC (with the 3 channel Matrox graphics card) to display on the Panoram screen. The facility also has a DVD player, a VCR and the capability to connect any laptop using a VGA cable for presentation purposes.
iCluster
The iCluster is a 50 megapixel tiled display visualization system built using Apple G5s and 30" monitors. This system is used to visualize real time data from the USArray network of sensors (part of the NSF funded Earthscope project) and other global observing systems. The iCluster is housed in the Earthscope Array Network Facility (ANF) office at IGPP and is also referred to as the "ANFwall."
The iCluster has been built using a 7 node PowerMac G5 cluster and 12 displays arranged in a 4 wide x 3 tall array. Each display supports a resolution of up to 2560 x 1600. The total resolution of the tiled display is nearly 50 megapixels. Each cluster node is a dual 2.5 GHz PowerPC with 8 GB RAM and the powerful NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics cards. This project is funded by the OptIPuter and the USArray projects.
MiniMe
The system, named Mobile INteractive Imaging Multidisplay Environment (MiniMe), consists of 15 24" panels arranged in a 5 wide and 3 tall grid. A Mac Mini is mounted behind each panel to provide a 1920x1200 video signal to each panel. The cumulative resolution of the display wall is nearly 30 million pixels. The system is designed to collapse and fit inside a shipping case. This allows Scripps researchers to carry the MiniMe system to meetings and conferences. For example, at the California & World Oceans conference in Long Beach (Sep 17-20 2006), researchers working on the SCCOOS and CENCOOS projects presented their research on the MiniMe at the exhibition.
OptIPuter Visualization Cluster
The OptIPuter Visualization Cluster is a scalable resolution, cluster driven, tiled LCD panel display system. A ten-node IBM cluster drives two IBM T221, 22.2" TFT LCD Displays that provide 18.2 megapixels of unparalleled resolution.
Geowall
The SIO Geowall system is a low cost, portable, passive stereo PC based 3D visualization system for presenting and manipulating visual datasets. The Geowall was developed by a collaboration between the University of Minnesota, the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Michigan. Currently the Geowall is an exhibit at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps.