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| Once the images have been taken by the rovers and transmitted back to Earth through NASA's Deep Space Network, we still have the problem of getting the viewer's eyes to only see the correct image (e.g., right eye viewing right image). This is done at Northwestern and our partner the Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum with a Geowall system. A geowall is a combination of inexpensive projection technology, fast graphics cards in ordinary computers. The total investment in a geowall the cost of a ordinary computer with a moderately fast graphics card and two projectors and is much more affordable than commercial solutions. Different sites use Geowall systems to visualize complicated systems of structure and dynamics in stereo to take advantage of the built-in image processing capabilities of our human brains to aid the understanding of spatial relationships. For more information on what a geowall is and who uses them, please visit www.geowall.org. The geowall system at Northwestern consists of a dual boot Windows/Linux PC powered by an AMD Athlon 2400+ CPU, 1 GB memory, 160 GB of disk space and a fast Nvidia Ti 4400 dual output graphics card. The software on the computers (combination of special purpose visualization software and display drivers) create images for the left and right eye, which is output to the left and right outputs of the graphics cards. The two outputs of the graphics card are routed to separate projectors, which are mounted on the ceiling. In front of each projector is a polarized filter with only allows light of a particular polarization to pass through. The users wear lightweight glasses which are essentially filters that are matched to those in front of the projectors. Thus, people can distinguish that the right eye only sees what is projected from the right projector, similarly for the left eye. | |||
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