Beginnings of the Holodeck: AMD's DX11 GPU, Eyefinity and 6 Display Outputs

holodeck, seriously?

this isn't even new tech, just the same old, but more, faster and better.

at our university, we have a CAVE. that's a 4x4x3 meter box with backprojection screens on four sides and a projection on the floor.

then you stand in there with polarized glasses that are motion-tracked.

now you can move around and what you see is really 3D. there's even a joystick-kinda input device (also motion-tracked) with which you can move and rotate what you see.

calling 6 displays the beginning of a holodeck... hah!

This setup has a fatal flaw: The center, where your character or crosshairs would normally appear, is right on the split between two screens.

Just a few years ago, you had to buy an SGI to the tune of several million dollars to get six graphics heads.

Now it's 2010's $500 video card. Which you install in commodity hardware.

I could never have predicted that standing in 2000.

>Carrell estimates that the human eye can directly resolve around 7 million pixels, almost twice the resolution of a 30" display. But that's just what it's directly focusing on, all of the peripherial vision brings the total up to around 100 million pixels. The Eyefinity demo I showed earlier was running at 24.5 million pixels on a single GPU; you can estimate that at this generation we'll be able to do about 50 million pixels with two GPUs and one more generation from now we'll get to that 100 million pixel marker. That's two years for a single GPU. Then give it a few more years to be able to render that many pixels but with enough complexity to actually look real.

Rendering something at the max resolution that the human eye can resolve isn't enough however; you have to feel immersed in the graphics. That's where Eyefinity comes in, at least what it starts to come in.

Carrell believes that in seven years we can have the first generation Holodeck up and running. For those of you who aren't familiar with the Trek reference, Carrell believes it'll take seven years to be able to deliver a 180 degree hemispherical display (you're not completely surrounded by displays but at least your forward and peripheral vision is) with positionally accurate and phase accurate sound (both calculated by the GPU in real time). The GPU will also be used to recognize speech, track gestures and track eye movement/position.

Why not VR helmets? That sounds so much more doable (and immersive) than building a wall (or for a holodeck, a room) of screens. I have enough trouble fitting a 40" LCD into my living room.

Yeah, but does it run Crysis?