Virginia Tech's 24 display workstation

Leading the life of an Engadget editor, you don't ever think you could come upon a rig or setup with too much screen real estate. Sure, you can overcompensate in any number of ways -- like, say, too much drive space (what, you really need 8TB?) -- but pixel acreage never struck us as one of them. Until now. Say hello to Virginia Tech's 31 million pixel-pusher friends, their 24 display array "workstation" runs at 10240 x 3072. Apparently it takes 12 Linux servers running distributed computing software to operate, and can play Quake III at 15-30FPS. Well done, sirs, well done. We take it back, it's not too much. It's never too much.

[via Joystiq]

[Dustin @ Mar 13th 2006 3:10AM]

Damn.

[Shadyman @ Mar 13th 2006 4:02AM]

Damn!

[penguinpirate7 @ Mar 13th 2006 4:02AM]

I second that damn.

[Sirius @ Mar 13th 2006 4:05AM]

Engadget shud give away a few sets of these for its next competitions :D
...
complete with quake III :D :P

on second thoughts.. maybe we should try halo or cs?

[wim @ Mar 13th 2006 4:38AM]

no damn at all.
i see 15 FPS in the top right..
what if you would have 4 pcixpress dual head cards with 8 triple head to go devices? No linux servers, just mucho video card power! and 24 screens...

[Adam @ Mar 13th 2006 4:47AM]

nice to see student tuition/taxpayer money/federal grants going to such a worthy project.

[Tom @ Mar 13th 2006 5:13AM]

Looks very nice ;)

[DDay @ Mar 13th 2006 5:15AM]

Oh, I definetly think this is a marvelous way to spend tax dollars. I just think they should hook it up to a couple quad SLi computers. That would do it, me thinks.

[aparaty cyfrowe @ Mar 13th 2006 5:17AM]

"impressive" :)

[Dr Doom @ Mar 13th 2006 6:08AM]

"excellent" :-D

[Prawner @ Mar 13th 2006 6:36AM]

Holy Moly

[Cem @ Mar 13th 2006 7:33AM]

I'd prefer to play this through Nintendo On ;-)

[Jon @ Mar 13th 2006 8:40AM]

Hey, I go to Virginia Tech, where is this, I wanna see :o

[Jeff @ Mar 13th 2006 9:24AM]

Virginia Tech is located in the state of Virginia. Very few, if any, tax dollars were spent on this project. Education is not a high priority to the politicians in Virginia.

[Mike @ Mar 13th 2006 9:39AM]

12. Virginia Tech is located in the state of Virginia. Very few, if any, tax dollars were spent on this project. Education is not a high priority to the politicians in Virginia.
---
Thats why it's cheaper for VA resident to go out of state to UNC, or Texas A&M (or many other out of state schools) and pay out of state rates, than to go instate to many VA schools. Must be nice for Techies to go to a school that can afford that, instead of lowering tuition rates to affordable levels. Very cool though, (guess I'm just jealous, CNU Comp Sci labs only has a handful of [new] sunblade 100 and 150s)

[Chris. @ Mar 13th 2006 9:49AM]

I worked on this at VT during my undergraduate research in 2005. It's a project being run by the HCI department under Dr. North. You can find it setup over in McBryde Hall. It's nice to see it gain some recognition. The guys who worked on it were great.

[Rafael Laguna @ Mar 13th 2006 10:27AM]

Back a while ago when our favourite toy blog reported on my dual 30" ACD setup (http://www.synapps.de/SynApps/index.php/CinemaDisplayWindows and http://www.synapps.de/SynApps/index.php/CinemaDisplayWindowsReloaded) many were making nasty fun of me (read the comments in http://www.engadget.com/2005/04/11/run-two-30-inch-apple-cinema-displays-on-your-pc/ ).

It's good to know there is always an Ueber-Geek! Thanks Virginia Tech!

[John Doe @ Mar 13th 2006 10:28AM]

They should have just continued the enclosure and made it a wrap around. 360* of Quake III goodness. Yumm.

[Walt_Mink @ Mar 13th 2006 12:31PM]

I have a buddy who works on this sort of thing for Tech. I saw the facility when it was over in the research park. They were working on a VR room that you controlled by a hand held location beacon. It was playing Quake at the time. It was pretty damned cool back in the day - especially with a belly full of beer. Hope you're reading this Sam - no worries about puking on that chair - I was throwing it out anyway.

[Mitch @ Mar 13th 2006 1:44PM]

Similar/earlier/bigger use of Chromium:

http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajlich/wall/8x5pics.html

[Saintless @ Mar 13th 2006 2:16PM]

That brings a tear to my eye. If only I could find an employer willing.... *sigh*

[Dave @ Mar 13th 2006 3:32PM]

Geez. . you go to all that effort and you end up with the crosshair in the middle of 2 screens! honestly, why not just add/remove a column to get that center screen??

[super-structure @ Mar 13th 2006 4:15PM]

You can read about the project at it's site. Yes your tax dollars went into this (although you shouldn't assume that just because it's a Univ.). They study quite a bit more than just playing Quake III on it. I think the benefits of this kind of research are pretty obvious (especially to gamers, but to others as well).

http://infovis.cs.vt.edu/gigapixel/

As for the complaints about politicians here in VA not caring about education, I for one disagree there. My wife and I came to VA solely to go to school here. There are also plenty of people who come down from NY, NJ, and PA because out-of-state here is more affordable.

[invaderluj @ Mar 13th 2006 4:16PM]

well that beats out my 3200x2400 display anyday

[HRM @ Mar 13th 2006 6:49PM]

"NOOOO! I have a dead pixel!!"

[EatingPie @ Mar 14th 2006 12:06AM]

Okay not to rain on their parade but... Um...

15fps? That's basically unplayable (and explains how they got a pic of a rail shot). Unfortunately, Quake III ain't scalable to multi-processors, so all those Linux boxes do you no good in this regard. Hence the pathetic framerate. (The link to the other site shows 5fps!)

For reference. My 5 year old AMD with a GeForce 3 (a what?) does 120fps solid (I even have it capped at 120).

It's still a kick-ass wall o' screens, but just not for 3D gaming.

-Pie

[Paul Ha @ Mar 14th 2006 4:23AM]

Engadget already reported on a bigger 50-screen monstrosity at UC Irvine.

http://www.engadget.com/2005/10/25/uc-irvines-monster-hiperwall-monitor/

I don't think it could play games though

[Charlie @ Mar 14th 2006 2:33PM]

LOL...WTF...HAHAHA I KNOW THIS GUY, he was my roomate. I knew he was working on this with some other people/freinds. Something about the web adress give it away and plus the name in the article. Damn that is some recognition. Congrats Andrew and that J.o.b.
I wonder if he knows about this posting.
Go HOKIES!

Thought I would never comment on engadget, but this is an exception.

[JMU-IVS @ Mar 29th 2006 8:12AM]

JMU, two hours north of Virginia Tech, has a wrap-around 73 panel display built by some students who ended up starting up a company

http://www.svp-va.org/v.php?pg=46&articleID=332