LAVA started to bid on developing/providing these "gateways" over a year
ago and dropped out after discovering how dysfunctional the whole deal
was (State procurement, NMCAC, etc.). The spec was well motivated
technically but had become a bit of a nightmare patchwork of
requirements that did not seem to acknowledge some real-world constraints.
Essentially they wanted two types of "visualization" gateways: One type
would be suitable for large installations and provide high quality 3D
visualizaition and teleconferencing, the other would be suitable for
smaller installations ( like a small classroom or meeting room).
There were a number of requirements that made a "reasonable"
installation totally unreasonable (like 3D teleconferencing at 1080p
resolution).
The low-end 3D systems they were clearly looking for were 3D Ready DLP
TVs which we already had lots of experience with. There were two
implicit requirements that these devices could not meet and we could not
get clarification on whether their shortomings were acceptable. The
shortcomings were: 1) while nominally 1920x1080, as TVs using
rear-projection DLP technology and fixed optics, there is an "overscan"
such that when used as a computer monitor (2D or 3D), a few dozen pixels
splash outside the viewable area. Particularly aggravating when working
with WinDoze as the little funky task bar gets clipped, no matter where
you put it 2) the smaller systems specced a *pair* of these devices and
it was strongly implied that they run in 3D together (as a single
system). This is a nice thought and in principle not that hard,
excepting that the rear-projected DLP is a single-chip system with a
color wheel and no facility for syncing any of that from the outside.
We had already run a pair of these side-by-side and the result was never
going to achieve what they implied they wanted.
Not being veteran bidders on gov't contracts, we finally threw our hands
up and went home. The contract was finally let to some group from out
of state called IOSYS and from what they are delivering, the state/NMCAC
clearly dropped many of the requirements (explicit or implicit) that
were confounding us (maybe even based on our various unacknowledged
responses outlining the problems with the spec we saw?).
The results are probably reasonable but far from what they were asking
for and the price seems really high (now that the bid is awarded) but
nobody in their right mind could have jumped through all the hoops they
had to with a very limited promise. Winning the contract did not
guarantee you would sell one much less the implied 22 systems.
I understand the final system costs $38K/installation. It consists of
2 Mitsubishi 3D DLP TVs, a Windoze Box, an Access Grid compatible
Teleconferencing system and ParaView (open source) software for
scientific visualization. No 3D teleconferencing.
They will be demo'ing it across 8 of the gateways this afternoon. The
only installations I know of for sure are SFCC and UNM... the others
surely include NMSU and NM Tech... Eastern and Western are a couple of
other likely suspects. Maybe UNMLA and Highlands?
Decent performance of the system would require good bandwidth to the
sites... I assume these first eight sites were chosen because they
already had decent connectivity.
- Steve
Douglas Roberts wrote:
political bullshit?
http://www.kob.com/article/stories/S1381807.shtml?cat=500
Curious to hear technical details... UNM and Encanto are apparently
already connected by high speed fiber.
http://newmexicosupercomputer.com/encanto4.html
..extending that to other colleges would be a big investment.
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
