Google’s Coolest 20% Project: Liquid Galaxy | Hacker News Reader

Google’s Coolest 20% Project: Liquid Galaxy

techcrunch.com

47 pointsnovicecoder9 comments

I've spent some time in one of these in a Google building and it is extremely cool. Each panel is hooked up to a relatively low-powered standard machine running Google Earth on a stripped-down Ubuntu release. From what I could surmise (and based on how I saw the system loading/caching data) each machine spoke on a network and had a differently-set camera view slaved off the center machine. The input device (in my case it was a 6-DOF joystick) is connected to the center machine.

Also, it got extremely warm in the room after a few minutes of usage. Plasma screen backlights + hot graphics cards = quick increase in temp.

It would be cool to hook it up to a virtual reality treadmill:

http://singularityhub.com/2009/10/19/cool-videos-of-virtual-...

SGI used to sell setups like this called reality centers. At first they seem like a gimmick, but they're terribly useful. When you can get a few people together and have an "ah ha!" moment within a minute of loading up your problem that can pay for itself in a matter of weeks.

Wish this stuff would come down market to be more mainstream. Maybe google will help with that.

It would be interesting to see if you could put this together using just the Google Street View API

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/services.html...

I don't see any particular reason why not (though it might not be so smooth)

How hard would it be to make one of these for a FPS? I've always wanted to try this. I'd love to get monitors on the floor (under glass) and ceiling too.

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/surroundgaming/en/home/

I play WoW in 5040x1050 across 3 monitors. I find it hard to go back. It's immersive when you want it to be. It's a great way to view information without blocking the main screen. Plus you can crank the font up to something pleasant.

I think this sort of 3 monitor setup will be everywhere in another few years. At least for hardcore gamers. And it will be supported by multiple video cards instead of a special piece of hardware.

Warning gaming on two monitors with this setup sucks. The center of the game (and likely where you are looking most of the time) is at the bi-section of the monitors.

Ati's newest graphics cards support a technology they are marketing as eyefinity -- attaching up to 6 displays to a single card and treating it as a single large surface.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=815975

Back in the days of Unreal Tournament and Quake3 you could change the field of view from the in-game command line, and if you were in software rendering mode, stretch the window over multiple monitors.

I've tried it to five monitors. Maybe you could change it to 360 and drag it all around you. It got pretty slow though, software rendering a larger and larger view and drawing it on cheaper and slower secondary video cards.

Vertically, I don't know.

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