Power of SUNY

SBU Researchers Design Revolutionary "Reality Deck"

Stony Brook University received a $1.4 million National Science Foundation grant to build what its creator described as the closest thing in the world to Star Trek's "holodeck."

Known as the "Reality Deck," the Immersive Giga-pixel Display will be a 40' x 30' x 11' high room in Stony Brook University's Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology (CEWIT) containing 308 LCD display screens driven by an 85-node graphics computing cluster that rivals the performance of modern supercomputers. And while it will not be quite the simulated reality environment found on the starship Enterprise, it will fully immerse visitors in 1.25 billion pixels of information, approaching the visual acuity of the human eye, according to the project director, Arie E. Kaufman, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department and Chief Scientist at CEWIT.

The $1.4 million grant, which will be matched by $600,000 from Stony Brook for a total of $2 million, is for three years. Dr. Kaufman said he expects the Realty Deck facility to be constructed in about a year.