Videowall – (Operations room) 18 1080p screens, eight dual monitor workstations

The Satellite Applications Catapult are very lucky to have the facilities they have and believe they have the potential to help save lives. To that end they’re opening their toy box for everyone to play with to try and do just that at their next hackathon. The premise is simple; in a disaster scenario, how would you use their facilities to best help those in need?

They have some data from the recent Nepal earthquake to work with but if you have a scenario of your own then feel free to being your ideas with you. Some of the ideas we’ve had are so far include;

  • Earthquake/natural disaster response
  • Coordination of people/aid
  • Search and rescue

They have a great range of kit at their disposal including;

  • Two videowalls, both with 24 cores, 256GB RAM and at least three NVidia Quadro K6000 graphics cards each. One has 28 720p monitors at 9562×3072 and the other a whopping 18 1080p monitors to a resolution of 11512×3240! These graphics cards have 12GB RAM and 3072 processing cores EACH!
  • An Oculus Rift DK1 – a virtual reality headset
  • Two Kinect 2 for Windows sensors – These are the new sensors based of the Xbox One design, each can track six people with full colour and depth support, they also have an excellent microphone array.
  • A Leap Motion sensor – this enables incredibly fine gesture tracking to help create more natural gesture based control systems.
  • Multiple large touchscreen devices – These include a number of electronic whiteboards with pen support and two four screen mini-video walls.
  • A Microsoft Surface Table – The SUR40, not to be confused with a tablet! This is a table PC that supports not only 50 simultaneous touches but also tag support, a great example of what it can do is NUIverse
  • A Microsoft Gadgeteer Kit – including loads of modules, this platform allows for rapid prototyping of hardware devices and includes GPS and GPRS (2g mobile data) support.
  • A van decked out with sat coms kit (I’m calling shotgun for the Zombie Apocalypse)
  • Raspberry Pi and Arduino devices – small microcontroller boards that can be programmed to perform functions without need of a full PC
  • 3D HD Dual Projection Facility – A large (5.5m x 1.9m) 3d HD projection system that can be used by up to 34 people simultaneously
  • Ovei Multimedia Pod – a multimedia pod that includes a surround sound system
  • AIS transceivers, a safety of life at sea transponder system
  • 3D screen
  • Parrot AR Drone – This can be controlled via wifi and has GPS and cameras on board
  • A transparent rear projected touchscreen

 

Satellite Applications Catapult, Harwell Campus
Dual 3D HD projector suite
Videowall (Saturn) – 28 720p screens.

 

 

The rest is up to you!

The event will be held at their office at Harwell Campus on September 12/13th, you are welcome to crash overnight too. To register for the event click here and add yourself to the group and event on Facebook to join the discussion!