FXAT SCREEN

The FXAT Screen seeks to reclaim the presence of architecture and its imagery in the public realm. CNC milled opaque plywood panels produce a thickened surface revealing the material stratification within the planar surfaces. In direct contrast to the hyper smooth and streamlined aesthetic of contemporary media devices, the FXAT Screen wraps an artificial topography around an exaggerated cantilevered form that addresses both the pedestrian corridor of the urban core and the main venues for the RAIC ArchitectureFestival. A gradient of openings migrates across the form toward the street, concluding with a 14 x 7-foot rear projection screen showing the work of 15 emerging Canadian architecture firms in the RAIC’s Future Voice: Situating Architecture Exhibition.

Seeing the Light: A Classroom-Sized Pinhole Camera Demonstration for Teaching Vision

We describe a classroom-sized pinhole camera demonstration (camera obscura) designed to enhance students' learning of the visual system. The demonstration consists of a suspended rear-projection screen onto which the outside environment projects images through a small hole in a classroom window. Students can observe these images in a darkened classroom. Instructors can demonstrate the function of the lens and pupil and the structural basis for nearsightedness and farsightedness. Students who saw the demonstration as part of a lecture on the visual system learned more (i.e., showed greater performance gains from pretest to posttest) than a comparable group of students who received the lecture only. Students reacted favorably to the demonstration. These data suggest that incorporating the demonstration into class presentations on vision can improve student learning.

Influence on Optical Properties of the New-Type Rear Projection Screen by the Content of Additive TiO2 Nano-Particle

Adding nano-particles with high refractive index can greatly improve the optical properties of the PMMA-based composites, which were developed as the new-type rear projection screen. In this paper, the influence on the optical properties, such as gain and view angle, by the content of additive TiO2 nano-particle was studied. Curves of optical properties versus content of nano-particle were obtained and the rational factors were found. Finally the reasons were discussed from the nanostructure point of view and the scattering principle.

An Immersive and Interactive Visualization System for Large-Scale CFD

We have been long involved in large-scale computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations in aerospace research. These days, as the computer power grows, output data from the simulations becomes larger and larger, and we feel that the current visualization methodology has its limitation in understanding. Thus, with the target concepts of reality, collaboration, and communication, we has built an immersive and interactive visualization system with a large-sized wall-type display. The system, which has been in operation since April 2001, is driven by a SGI Onyx 3400 server with 32 CPUs, 64Gbytes memory, and 6 IR3 graphics pipelines, and comprises a 4.6×1.5-meter (15×5-foot) rear projection screen with 3 high-resolution CRT projectors, supporting stereoscopic viewing, easy color/luminosity matching, and accurate edge-blending. The system is mainly used for visualization of large-scale CFD simulations. This paper will describe the new visualization system introduced at the National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan, and the features of the system are discussed while illustrating some typical visualized examples.