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Tromsø Students Make a Gorgeous, Massive 22-Megapixel Display Wall

by Matthew Zuras on March 24, 2010 at 05:35 PM

We here in America know that everything is bigger in Texas, but the Lone Star's got nothing on Scandinavia. For example, Norway has the largest capital reserve of any country, making it the wealthiest in the world by monetary value. Some of the largest sea predators -- like the sperm whale and the basking shark -- call Norwegian waters home, while the people of Norway represent one of the largest secular populations in the world. And they also make really, really big displays!

Students at the University of Tromsø have created a 22-megapixel display wall. (To put that into perspective, your writer's 13-inch Macbook has a 1.05-megapixel widescreen XGA display.) This thing is massive, with the overall display space constructed from 28 projectors and driven by a display cluster of 30 computer nodes. "Each projector creates a 1024x768 resolution image, which when tiled together with the others form a 7168x3072 resolution display," claim the developers on the university's site.

What to do with such a big 'ol screen? Well, all those snazzy gigapixel images that have been floating around the Web (such as this amazing, interactive photo of Paris) are given proper treatment by this gargantuan display. In the video below, one student demos the multi-touch and gesture-controlled interface while zooming through a 13.3-gigapixel image of the city of Tromsø. Sure, this has little practical application right now -- but it brings us one step closer to living in 'Minority Report.' Which is a good thing, right? [From: University of Tromsø, via: Engadget]


Tags: display, display wall, DisplayWall, Gesture Control, GestureControl, gui, interactive, interactive wall, InteractiveWall, megapixel, multi-touch, top, ui, university of tromso, UniversityOfTromso

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