Immersive Room Uses Nvidia GPUs

Iowa State University’s "C6," the country’s first six-sided virtual reality room, has designed in Nvidia GPUs to take cyber battles to new extremes with advanced visual computing. The 100-million pixel virtual experience engineered by Mechdynes’ Fakespace display division incorporates NVIDIA's Quadro professional graphics processing units (GPUs) in the improved visualization center. The center operates at more than 16 times the resolution of a typical immersive room and more than double the resolution of the five-sided, 43-million pixel room also created by Mechdyne. Iowa State's project, which is supported by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, incorporates a Hewlett-Packard computer cluster featuring 96 NVIDIA Quadro GPUs, 24 Sony digital projectors, an eight-channel audio system and ultrasonic motion tracking technology. "Highly realistic graphics are a key component to the incredible realism displayed in the new C6 virtual environment," said James Oliver, director of Iowa State’s Virtual Reality Applications Center (VRAC) and professor of mechanical engineering at the university. "NVIDIA Quadro graphics deliver a high-resolution experience that is unmatched. The difference between the old solution and the new 100-million-pixel experience is like putting on your glasses in the morning." According to Matt Szymanski, VP and product manager at Mechdyne, said the NVIDIA Quadro product was a good fit for the project. "This is not an off-the-shelf display," he said, "and we had to work closely with NVIDIA’s engineers to push the technology to the very limits of what could be delivered."