The Reality Deck, a 416 screen
super-high resolution virtual reality four-walled surround-view theater, is the
largest resolution immersive display ever built driven by a graphic
supercomputer. Its purpose and primary design principle is to enable scientists,
engineers and physicians to tackle modern-age problems that require the
visualization of vast amounts of data. The Reality Deck, constructed with a
$1.4 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant and a $600,000 match from
Stony Brook University, is the first to break the one billion pixel mark with a
resolution five times greater than the second largest in the world. This
technology will be used for visualizing and analyzing big data.
In the Reality Deck, data is displayed with an unprecedented amount of resolution that saturates the human eye, provides 20/20 vision, and renders traditional panning or zooming motions obsolete, as users just have to walk up to a display in order to resolve the minutiae, while walking back in order to appreciate the context that completely surrounds them. Another feature of the Reality Deck is the infinite canvas, a 360-degree smart screen that changes images according to the location of the viewer walking around the Reality Deck, so the same image is never viewed twice and infinitely big data can be explored. Future applications to stream video in real time are also in the works.
More information: