Stony Brook to build giga-pixel virtual reality room

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is awarding a $1.4 million grant to Stony Brook University to build the Reality Deck, an immersive giga-pixel virtual reality room. The room, expected to be constructed in the next year, will be 40'x30'x11', contain 308 LCD screens, be driven by an 85-node graphics computing cluster, and employ computer vision technology.

According to Professor Arie E. Kaufman, the Reality Deck is a "unique tiled display environment…with more than a billion pixels that can provide a life-like, realistic immersion into the data to be explored and reasoned with. This revolutionary facility is a one-of-a-kind exploration theater. It is an engineering feat – a unique assembly of hundreds of LCD displays, graphics cluster, sensors, communication, computer vision and human-computer interaction technologies to deliver a holistic system with a significant societal and research and development value."

More information is available from a press release.