Infrastructure

Our lab has four major visualization environments.

C-Wall

The C-Wall features a single screen, stereo wall, driven by two dual AMD Opteron PCs with Nvidia Quadro 3400 video cards. They are driving four JVC HD2k projectors with a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels each, of which we are using 1920x960 pixels to achieve a square image. The projector images are displayed edge to edge without an overlap. We use circular polarization filters to separate the stereo images. The concept of the C-Wall is described here.

Varrier

The Varrier wall, aka Lambdavision Display System, consists of 60 LCD monitors, arranged in a semi cylinder. It can generate autostereoscopic images at a resolution of about 40 million pixels per eye. The system consists of 31 dual AMD Opteron machines, each with 4GB RAM, 1.6TB disk arrays, dual gigabit ethernet NICs and NVidia Geforce 7900 video cards. Each display node drives two 20" NEC LCD monitors (1600 x 1200 pixels). The system is running on Suse Linux 10.0. We support three software environments which can drive the cluster:

• Electro
• SAGE
• COVISE

Multipurpose Room (Black Box)

The multipurpose room at Calit2 is a 2-story, reconfigurable performance space for experiments with the audience’s relationship to the physical environment and mediated elements. The IVL runs a stereo projection setup consisting of dual Christie projectors with a resolution of 1600x1200 pixels each, driven by a dual AMD Opteron PC with a fast RAID array.

Digital Theatre

Calit2 has a 200-seat theatre with ultra-high resolution video and 20 channel surround sound. The IVL runs a Sony SRX-R110 projector for uncompressed 4K (8 megapixels) digital cinema, which is four times as many pixels than the current HD standard. The projector can be driven by a Silicon Graphics Prism visualization system, streaming at 24 frames-per-second from an SGI InfiniteStorage RM-660 disk array onto a screen 18 feet high by 32 feet wide. The Prism is connected by a 10Gbit/sec network connection to the global OptIPuter network, making the Calit2 theater the most advanced digital cinema theater currently in operation in the world. Another option for 4k video playback and recording is a set of NTT JPEG2000 hardware codecs, which can operate at 24 or 30 frames per second.