PC Clusterrenderizer

Our PC clusters are configured to drive multi-projector display systems, with a single PC node for either one or two projectors, depending on your graphics card ( two projectors to provide stereoscopic view ). For mono-display, you can also build a tiled monitor wall by racking all your old monitors on a grid-rack. So this PC cluster can support monoscopic as well as passive-stereo display. The cluster is built with only off-the-shelf ( out-of-service actually ) commodity components and all the software are of open source. With a variety of flexible python configuration, you can do either arbitrary high resolution( such as 1280x2^n/2x1024x2^n/2 for a 2ⁿ PCs cluster ) tile-like rendering or CAVE-like rendering.

Currently we have a four-PC-cluster demo system, which can do both tiled display and CAVE.

Besides old PCs, you should have a decent switch, the number of ports depends on how many PCs you have for this cluster. As we mentioned before all the support software as well as developing environment are of open source, so there no budget happens on this.

Portable Stereoscopic Solution

1. laptop with stereoscopic monitor, such as Sharp’s 3D notebook Actius AL3DU around £1600

2. Normal laptop with graphics card has dual head output, plus stereoscopic head mounted display or goggles. The price of HMD or goggles are ranging from £300.00 to ..indefinite huge number.

3. Normal laptop with stereoscopic supported projector, such as Infocus DepthQ 3D projector circa£2500

4. The followings are amateur’s solutions. First, you can use a normal laptop ( almost any laptop will work ), plus shutter glasses. For the LCD monitor most possibly polarized a degree, so you may need to search for a piece of cellophane for most laptop monitors but THERE ARE some LCD monitors don’t need. Secondly, you have another choice you can even use polarizer with your laptop while apply half-wave cellophane on half of you monitor. This may need some skills or experience though we can provide tutor for free.

So we recommend the first three options for business application. But if you want to play with stereo at home, we’d like to recommend the last option. You actually need almost naught additional pay to get stereo besides some of your time.

System requirements:

Graphics Card: quadro-buffer and with dual head
VRAM: no less than 256MB
System RAM: no less than 1024MB

A sample laptop system circa £2000

Dell Precision Mobile Workstation M70

CPU: Pentium® M 780 (2.26GHz,2MB L2 Cache,533FSB)15.4 WUXGA
Graphics Card: NVIDIA® Quadro® FX Go1400 256MB OpenGL graphics
Memory: 2GB, 533MHz, DDR2 SDRAM (2 DIMMS)
HD: 80GB Hard Drive (7200 RPM)
DVD: 8-24-24-24X CDRW/DVD Combo Drive w/ CyberLink PowerDVD™