The Projection Room

          If you’re interested in what the equipment looks like, here’s a peek behind the curtain.  The images are created by two Sony projectors, each capable of 4096x2160 resolution – that’s 4x the pixel count of a 1080p screen.  The two projectors are needed for seen 3D images – one sends an image to your left eye and the other to your right eye.  The projectors look like this:

          Those filter screens on the front have a wire attached to the bottom left of each.  They electronically turn the image on an off very quickly which handles the image timing so it can be synchronized to the same thing in the 3D glasses that you are wearing.  This style of 3D image rendering is known as active stereo.  The other kind (with polarized lenses in the glasses) is passive stereo.  If you haven’t seen the difference you need to come into the theater and check it out.  The 3D images are brighter and more compelling.

          The steel rack that houses the projectors is finely adjusted so the two images are exactly on top of each other at the screen focal distance.

          Here’s another view of the projectors from the side:

          These babies generate so much heat that they need their own chimneys!  (See the insulated venting tubes coming out of the back.)

They also need a significant exhaust fan running all the time, but this venting system does a good job of muffling most of the noise.

          The projection room is actually quite small, and in order to get an image size big enough to cover the entire screen we bounce the image of a big mirror.  This picture is taken standing behind the screen.  See the image of the projectors in the mirror:

          As for the computers driving the images, they just look like your standard tower server case, but they are an HP 4-way 83 GF, 16 Mb linux cluster, with 8 nVidia Quadro fx4500 video processor cards.  This is the part where the serious gamers start to drool.  Anyway, for completeness, here’s a picture: