Think you have a big screen TV? Check out these monster video walls

Taken from: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/137543-think-you-have-a-big-screen-tv-check-out-these-monster-video-walls

In honor of National Big Screen TV Day, aka Black Friday, we thought we’d share a couple massive screens unveiled by GE and by Stony Brook University that you can drool over. Now that CNN-sized interactive displays have become fairly commonplace, GE has upped the ante, unveiling a 180-degree, 40-foot, interactive video wall in its Toronto Customer Experience Center (CEC). Made by Prysm, Inc. of San Jose using Laser Phosphor Display (LPD) technology, the display will allow visitors to take a guided tour of GE products and technologies in an immersive setting.
Prysm’s proprietary LPD technology relies on a 405nm laser, similar to that used for Blu-ray, which is modulated as it is projected onto a phosphor layer. The phosphor layer is unusually thin, providing for a claimed industry-leading 178-degree viewing angle. Rather than attempt to light an entire large display with one laser, Prysm’s display walls are built from multiple tiles, each with its own laser engine, laser processor, and phosphor layer.

The 10-foot-high video wall is constructed from more than one hundred 320×240 integrated LPD display tiles. The tiles support viewing from a full 178-degree field of view and are much lower power than a backlit projector system of similar size, or an LCD array like the one Sharp uses in its 5D attraction. Another advantage of the Prysm system over a multi-projector-based system like HP’s Photon is that it can support a variety of screen shapes — like the curved wall used by GE in this installation.
While the LPD display is not touch-enabled, it is controllable from an iPad used by the visitors’ GE host. GE and Prysm aren’t revealing the cost of the display, but it probably won’t be the deal of the day on LogicBuy any time soon.

Stony Brook takes you around the world — virtually

While the magic of the GE video wall is largely in the display technology, a research project at Stony Brook University pushes the envelope in processing power to create what it calls a “Reality Deck.” Featuring a record-shattering 1.5 billion pixels on 416 screens, the $2 million deck is powered by over 220 TFLOPS of processor power.

The Deck actually has four walls, although of course we can only show three in this picture. 416 separate screens make up the walls, all driven by a massive graphics supercomputer, with 240 CPU cores, 80 GPUs and 1.2TB of memory. The display has what is called an “infinite canvas” feature, allowing it to change what is shown as a viewer walks around the deck area.
Source material for the Reality Deck can come either from massive muti-gigapixel panoramic images or architectural models which can be visualized in real time. To complete the experience, the system features a sound system with 22 speakers and four subwoofers.
The Reality Deck’s $2M price tag was funded by the National Science Foundation and Stony Brook University, as part of a project aiming to enable breakthroughs in healthcare, national security and energy research.
For those who thought the system in Minority Report was cool, or that a 4K 3D display would be as good as it gets, these systems point to an exciting future of Black Fridays full of discount video wall promotions.