Control Room Ambience
Barco is one of the coolest companies in the display business- super powerful stuff. Looking at their control room designs makes me think how cool it would be to do something like this in a really central hub like Clark or Tresidder. It would be a screen that shows just tons of information about what’s happening at Stanford. Lots of video all at once, a map of campus, daily headlines, a huge list of events, webcams…you would walk up to it and feel like you have the absolute pulse of campus right in front of you. People would just go stand there to watch the thing.
Once we get rolling with the first network of screens, we should play with some projectors and try stuff like this out.
If we really want to make a statement, a big display like this at the central campus hub sure goes far.
Barco’s are nice. Shockingly (to me at least), a Barco projector, and I’m not exagerating at all, costs more than the entire ISIS project. But I agree that network op centers are seriously cool–of course they’re also designed for use by experts.
The question is whether people really want to have to go somewhere to access information. As pointed out by our friends at HP Labs, the mothership centralized info display concept flies in the face of getting information when you want, where you want it which is the goal of using a network of screens, the web, palmtops, personalization, etc.
Hey, Stanford students are “experts” at being Stanford students–or at least they should be.
Just as we’ve divided the plasma installations from the smaller LCDs, this could fill another niche, the “central location” that several of our interviewees in the ISIS promotional video asked for.
Actually Barco’s already done ISIS.
Another interesting nugget to think about: an IMAX projector lamp puts out 600 000 lumens (that’s “600,000″ in American). How long till we can do that with LEDs? When they do stereo films, they use one lamp for projecting each eye’s track, so there’s over a million lumens blasting at the screen. I’ll have to remember by sunscreen next time.