May 2007 - January 2008

The CATTLab led to an interest in academic research laboratories. I really enjoyed my graphics and visualization work there (as I have since, well, forever), so I hunted down a graphics lab at the University of Maryland. Amitabh Varshney in the Graphics and Visual Informatics Laboratory (GVIL) was kind enough to take me on as an undergradaute researcher.

While I was there, the big thing at GVIL was working on distributed systems, namely our LCD wall. This wall consists of an array of five by five Dell 24" widescreen monitors running at 1920x1200, for a grand total of 57 megapixels worth of display power. Below is a picture of the wall displaying one of our demo scenes, a fly-through of an expansive virtual city.

City Displayed on our 57mp Display Wall

A critical part of these systems is being able to display the same scene on an n x n wall as on, say, the screen of a laptop. There are huge technical challenges with such a feat. Below is an image of part of the same city model, rendered (without textures) on a single machine.

City Displayed on a Single Screen, No Textures

A more complete overview of my project is described in the Projects section of this site.

The wall system is powered by UMD's CPU-GPU cluster. More information on that can be found here.

Point of contact: Dr. Amitabh Varshney <varshney AT cs DOT umd DOT edu>