VizWorld.com

UCSD and Kaust have partnered up to build an impressive new visualization system called ‘NexCAVE’.  The ‘NexCAVE’ isn’t actually a new name (First I heard of it was a year ago), but this is the first I’ve heard of a 21-panel version.  Built entirely out of JVC’s 3D LCD HDTV’s with Passive Displays (far simpler than trying to synchronize 21 active displays), it builds a hemispherical display around the user (if you can withstand the bezels).

Projectors are inherently hard to align and keep aligned in these kinds of CAVE environments, but the NexCAVE panels’ left- and right-eye images are automatically aligned, which significantly reduces eye fatigue. The NexCAVE system is well suited for faculty and students to review and manipulate 3D data of all kinds.

An impressive construction to be sure, but the bezels are always an annoyance.  When will consumer bezel-less televisions hit the market?

NexCAVE Aids Research at UCSD | insideHPC.com.

Hardware 3d, jvc, kaust, nexcave, stereoscopic, ucsd

I’m waiting for the SC09 Opening Address to begin (“The Rise of the 3D Internet”, by Intel’s Justin Rattner) and on the opening video reel they have a fantastic video from Sheldon Brown of the Experimental Game Lab at UCSD of a project called “Scalable City”.

Scalable City creates an urban/suburban/rural environment via a data visualization pipeline. Each step in this pipeline builds upon the previous, amplifying exaggerations, artifacts and the patterns of algorithmic process. The results of this are experiences such as prints, video installations and interactive multi-user games and virtual environments.

Throughout these artworks, a variety of computer concept buzzwords take on physical form. Wallowing in them provides equal measures of delight and foreboding, creating a vision of cultured forms that we are rapidly creating. The project neither indicts nor embraces this future, but offers an extrapolation of its algorithmic tendencies, heightening one's awareness of the aesthetics of the underlying logic as it becomes the determinant of much of our cultured existence.

The video is impressive, and you can see screenshots and the trailer on his website.

via Scalable City by Sheldon Brown.

Graphics, Science art, city, sc09, ucsd