Give this a read. No mention of price or if this will become available to the public but it does sound good.

http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2007/apr-jun/pluribus.html

indeed it does

That's quite interesting...

I wonder how long before we see some manufacturer effectively pack 4 inexpensive projectors into a single chassi for a system like this to optimize anywhere you throw up a picture. One chassi and power supply with a narrower range of variables should be less expensive than 4 projectors. Hmmm...

I first assumed they were tiling the pj's and the technology was a new way of doing the blend (though I wondered about elevated blacks at the seams).

But apparently not (they don't mention tiling until later), so I don't see where a resolution increase would come from.

It's interesting that they are using 15 year old technology implemented in CRTs to do this (the camera).

I don't know though if I buy that 10- $1000 projectors will look the same/better as a $100K unit. Heck, even 7 $1000 projectors won't look better than one JVC RS-1. (IMHO)

I can see this working for rental situations, but will theaters be pulling out the Barco and Christie units in favor of 10 low budget units? I doubt it.

They only give enough information to wet your appetite, a lot goes un mentioned.
Is it one computer with multiple outputs , do you need multiple PCs which would make up for the savings using cheap projectors:)

The big question for me is about the wobulation effect. I don't buy the pix shown below:

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/feature_stories/2005/05wobulation.html

A fixed pixel device is just that, a fixed number of pixels. How can you get rid of the pixellation shown in the second image? While typing this, I re-read the article about 3X, and it hit me that if they are using two projectors and offset one projector by 1/2 pixel, then send two 1/2 pixel offset images to each projector (and alternate the projection of each individual image at a high rate of speed, then yes, I can see how you can get a higher resolution out of two low res projectors.

I'd have to see this in person... next year's INfocomm maybe?

Back in the day CINERAMAX may have coined the term " Home Theater" before Runco but me and my girlfriend back in our teens coined the term "Wobulation" well before HP :)

Is that what it was called back then? :D

for some reason, when i read that article, i had to think of the High End booth at Infocomm.

High End Systems makes moving lights for concerts. All sorts of different luminaires that really are on the cutting edge of pro lighting.

Well, when i was by their booth at the start of the show, i saw a big "blend" image and my only thought was that it was nice, but the seams were a little visible on lighter images. SO i kind of blew it off as yet another blended image that really was not good enough.

THe next day i was walking by and i saw the image "tiles" move apart and suddenly become 8 unique seperate images. ANd i also saw that that big tiles image was made by 8 of these... http://www.highend.com/products/digital_lighting/dl_1.asp I freaked out.

http://www.highend.com/images/products/dl1.jpg

Everything we know about projection and multiple tiled images is changing.

Just like the 5K LCD projector killed the 30K CRT proj... tiling is going to kill the 100K monsters. Not today, and just like the digital revolution, it took a while for high end reference home theatre to accept it, but it is coming

Dizzman

Good stuff. I just got a spam email for another LED wall. You are right, I do not think we will be looking at FPs in the future. These things will put the big xenon canons out of business.

One wonders what happens if you combine Pluribus with the pixel shifting design of four JVC RS1s. And couldn't you just control this automatically all via RS-232? 2800 lumens, 4K projector. $24K + cost of Pluribus.

I hope it works better than what they demoe'd in April
http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/05/hp-shows-off-some-future-gen-gaming-tech/

http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.engadget.com/media/2007/04/hp-gaming-tech-03.jpg

You know I've been reading hyperbole for so long I am just way to much of a skeptic. The great thing about this type of stuff is that as long as its exists only in the lab and no one gets to see it its potential is limited only by the imagination of those writing the PR release. Often what is written is not much more than a fairy tale. The picture shows several projectors set up as if they were being blended. So how exactly can those images simultaneously change from a blended image to a stacked (or in their words overlayed) image?

The statement that this would be a great boon for movie theaters is also pure hyperbole. The idea that movie theater are going to be buying 10 projectors for a theater to save money is the type of stuff that inventors with their heads buried in the sand think.

BTW,

Immersive visualization is actually a huge interest of mine so when I "poo poo" this, it's not because I don't think the concept is cool, I just wish they'd provide a few facts. Here's another company that has some technology that uses cameras to calibrate many projectors.

http://www.mersive.com/home/tabid/99/Default.aspx
http://2006.ideafestival.com/?805

mersive had a neat display at infocomm. alas they did not have as good source material as they could have. and i could not figure out hte stupid video game in the immersive curved screen setup.

Dizzman, the Genesis 'I can't Dance' tour had two screens that split or combined. That was what, 12-13 years ago?

I never did figure out where the images were projected from...

those were LED screens that were driven off a production switch system. the screens were on motorized tracks.

Well, LED/Jumbotron something.

Interesting. I thought they were projected. Mind you, I was sitting off to the side, so I didn't get a good front view of them. Figures you'd know the answer though..:)

HP has $s and is a good bet for winning at this capital intensive hardware game.

It's interesting to note that an MIT spin out, Scalable Display Technologies has a patent on the core concept of blending projectors into a seamless display using a camera for calibration. See US patent 6456339.

With "Immersive" I see a work station next to each projector. Still no info on how HP is doing this but I do not know of any video card with more two or three outputs or any PC that can handle more then two video cards so I am speculating you would need a PC for every projector as well. A lot of details missing.

With "Immersive" I see a work station next to each projector. Still no info on how HP is doing this but I do not know of any video card with more two or three outputs or any PC that can handle more then two video cards so I am speculating you would need a PC for every projector as well. A lot of details missing.

In this article it sounds like 1 PC is needed:

According to my PCMagazine (More geared towards the PC Gaming set rather than HT) , in an article about "5 Ideas that will reinvent modern computing" http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2147448,00.asp
The end of the article states"A gaming PC with dueling graphics cards can line up 12 projectors in as little as 5 minutes, producing a 16-by-9 foot image with 4,096-by-2,304 resolution."