Immersive Video Wall

The teaching astronomy lab on the University of Louisville's Belknap campus has a room dedicated to immersive video. It features 4 theater quality projectors creating a blended high definition (HD) quality screen that students can view interactively. The projectors are driven by a state-of-the-art graphical display computer system running Vioso Anyblend edge blending software on a Windows operating system.

This page is for the use of teaching assistants in the lab, and for students and others who may be interested in the technology.

How to use the room

For students this room is very easy to use. The instructor and teaching assistants will have it ready for you, and the application you will use for your work in that lab will be running. However, here are some suggestions, and a few requests. First, the requests:

• Use only the application which is needed for this lab. It will be "full screen". (If not, ask for help.)
• Do not make any adjustments or changes to the projectors, or to run any other windows application on the system. We have it optimized for this one task, and the next group will need this application running.
• Do not turn off the projectors. It takes a while for them to cool down to allow turning them back on. The assistants will do this when it is appropriate.

And then the suggestions:

• Have one of the group "drive" and the others interact with the driver. You can change roles, of course.
• The best view is from the front seats, close to the screen. With Stellarium displaying the horizon across the wall, the sky will be scaled almost as you would see it outside.
• It helps to keep a low level light on. This reduces the appearance of a blending artifact in the black background. (We are working to remove it.)

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