The University of Illinois at Chicago is moving the classic laboratory visualization system out of the back-rooms and into the mainstream with their new Cyber-commons high-tech classroom.
“In the past, these high-performance environments have been hidden away in research labs and used exclusively by researchers,” said EVL director Jason Leigh. “This cyber-commons opens up the technology to large student populations so that we can better understand the role of high-performance and ubiquitous computing in future classrooms.”
The new classroom has 19-million-pixels of contiguous workspace, and a massive centerpiece of a 20ft by 6ft tiled display wall.
The tiled displays, connected to data sources over high-speed networks, allow students to create electronic posters in real time by providing easy access to remote Gigabyte visualization data objects, just as the Web makes access to remote lower-resolution images today. Launching, juxtaposing, and resizing the content are done using a gyroscopic mouse, or remotely using a laptop.
The display wall is driven by a single computer, but will be replaced by a cluster in the fall for higher-end visualizations of supercomputer simulations.
via Laboratory Equipment – Cyber-Commons Opens at UIC. and UIC.
