The 200" Super Screen

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Mark stepped onto the stage. He was eager to demonstrate his design for a 4x flat-panel super screen that was comprised of sixteen 50" televisions. He had finally figured out how to get a good picture out of it, but for now it was still cloaked under a red, velvet sheet.

He addressed the audience, "This is the next generation of television. It makes HD look like grainy garbage. In fact, the reason it took so long was because my team and I had to design a computer program that could show off its true potential. We tried hooking up a 1080 HD professional football game, but cable companies need to upgrade to at least 2880 resolution."

"We spent two weeks racking our brains before inspiration came." On the side of the stage sat a table with a box on top of it. Mark picked up the box and revealed a swirling lava lamp. He continued, "We realized that software algorithms could give us the ability to swirl amorphous colors around the screen in the brilliant detail we needed to show how amazing this thing is. With nothing more than a souped-up Mac Mini, we gave birth to a visual nirvana."

He yanked the velvet sheet off the super screen. The colors swirled and danced on the screen with perfect resolution. He smiled widely as he described it, "Look at the clarity between the images on the farthest edges of the view. It's as close to natural vision as you can achieve with a simulation model."

He continued, "I look forward to the day when video cameras and broadcast streams can actually handle this much data. This system is designed to handle epic motion pictures and captivating sporting events but it would take about 256GB to make a two-hour movie look good on this thing. That's about 10 Blu-ray discs or a transfer rate of 36MB/s sustained for two hours if it was streaming from Netflix. Needless to say, that other technology is going to be playing 'catch up' for the next decade."

Just then, a call came from the audience, "How long would you need to build ten more systems just like this one?"

Mark scratched his head, "I dunno, two months or less."

"I'd pay a million bucks for that." A collective gasp rose from the rest of the audience.

Mark held a shocked look on his face. He hadn't anticipated being able to make a sale at the demonstration, but that much money would easily fund his research team for the next year. He replied, "Make it a million per screen and you got yourself a deal."

***

Five months later, Mark looked up at his super screens in Manhattan's Times Square. The swirling lava lamp imagery had been replaced with product advertisements and commercials that were selling Coca Cola and Gap Jeans. "Not exactly the Super Bowl, but at least I'm rich enough to retire."

Original photograph by Randy Montoya of Sandia National Labortory. Used in the article Sandia supercomputers offer new explanation of Tunguska disaster. The image depicts an asteroid strike from a simulation model where projectile-velocity is factored into the destruction-capacity-calculation used to determine that smaller asteroids can do a lot more damage than we previously realized.

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