HIVE Update

Well, it turns out the HIVE is NOT working in third dimension! What has happened is that the two projectors have been offset enough to give the impression of 3D without actually doing it which is a huge blow as we have a tour today for Tavish Scott, the Scottish Liberal Democrats leader.

Also, the iz3d driver or dodgy xna programming by not only myself but John has resulted in our programs not being displayed correctly when we do try to do it in real 3D.

Bummer

HIVE Part 2

Today was a bit of an eye opener. The HIVE is barely operational while we are waiting for 2 Matrox TripleHead2Go boxes to come in. We had workies in 3 days ago installing small scaffolding and the Vertalis guys in putting a new constellation of trackers on the ceiling to increase the range of motion on the headtracker, gloves, wand etc.

Regardless, PhD students have to get up and on with things and there was another RDC induction at Dudhope castle that we were to attend. I had teaching until 11 this morning so I had to go in a bit late to listen to some of my fellow PhD students present their work to their peers.

Of course, 15 minutes in the place and I was informed that I needed to give out my password for the HIVE....hmm, I think not. There had been a last minute scramble to get the Chief of Police for Tayside and some STV cameras in for a photo op and, of course, they wanted the HIVE.

I am loving the extra responsibility of helping restore the HIVE and hopefully taking its capabilities to a new level but I seriously under-estimated the work involved and the drop-it-like-its-hot attitude I have had to take with other tasks in order to fulfil these tour commitments.

Chris

HIVE

Anyone familiar with Abertay University will know (or should know) about the HIVE. It stands for Haptic (Human) Interactive Virtual Environment and consists of two rather large screens with 4 rear projectors to allow us (students and staff) to view content in stereo.

I have taken it upon myself (honestly...lack of volunteers) to help rebuild the computer that runs the HIVE in my limited and precious free time.

In case you are interested, the guts of the computer can be found below

Motherboard: ASUS P6T7 WS SuperComputer
CPU: Intel i7 Extreme Edition
RAM: 12GB corsair DDR3
Graphics cards: 2 x EVGA 295 GTX (quad SLI) and one EVGA 8800GTX for CUDA computing and physx processing
Hard Drives: 2 x 1.2 Terrabyte Western Digital 7200rpm drives. 1 x 320GB Seagate barracuda

I look forward to posting some benchmark scores from 3DMark06, 3DMarkVantage and SisSandra, keep your eyes peeled.

Chris