News from all over - Irvine

"We had to build something big enough to make me look small," said Stephen F. Jenks, the 6-foot-10 assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science who helped design the university's 23-by-9-foot Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Wall. The wall consists of rows of linked monitors, each of which displays a portion of the picture.

For those whose concept of high-definition centers on whether to buy an LCD or plasma TV, here's a number to chew on: 200 million pixels. That's enough to provide a picture about 100 times more detailed than the best high-definition TV. And it's enough to have made UCI's newest research tool, dubbed the HIPerWall, a hit among scientists throughout Southern California.

"It's exciting," said Joerg Meyer, a professor of computer graphics and visualization who helped develop the screen's software. "This display has higher resolution than the human retina can see."

Built three years ago with a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, the HIPerWall has been used to observe changes in the individual brain cells of schizophrenics, predict climate change by comparing a century's worth of weather models and study the cells of a woman who died of ovarian cancer.

"We can see the big picture," Jenks said. Or the small.
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