Forbe's previews AMD's CES SurroundHouse

[caveman-jim]

Long-time attendee Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) will be advancing its own view of user-centric computing, a vision laid out this week by Mark Papermaster, the company’s chief technology officer. Papermaster sees us being at what he calls “another inflection point” in the development of technology and society. “We’re well in to mobile computing,” he said. “Now, you think of information as an entitlement.”

Papermaster calls the soup of pervasive computing devices and connections in which we swim “Surround Computing,” and a key transition, of which we are just at the beginning, is the move to natural interfaces. He cites Apple’s Siri and Google Voice as examples of not just voice input but semantic interpretation — the derivation of meaning from spoken words. Other examples of this new-style input are Microsoft’s Kinect, which interprets gestures. In many mobile applications, the finger has replaced mouse and key or button entry.

On the output side, things are also moving apace toward a world of truly immersive experiences. At CES, AMD will be showing its SurRoundHouse, a hyperbolic demonstration of just how immersive computing output can be. The demo is actually a house, which will be situated outside the Las Vegas Convention Center. Viewers will enter into what looks like a “farm cabin” with 10 windows, each of which is actually a 55” LED TV. These TVs are tied together by AMD Eyefinity display technology, which allows them to be run from a single PC with three AMD FirePro graphics cards.

Also at work will be AMD’s Discrete Digital Multipoint Audio, which can render 3D positional audio, in this case via 32 speakers, including four subwoofers. It is the audio that leads the viewer to integrate the separate images in the windows into a single coherent experience. The audio fills the gaps between the separate displays and allows the viewer to figure out what is happening as a complex story line unfolds. Without positional audio, the story is much more difficult to understand.

Read more at Forbes.com

[bman212121]

Not as impressive as I was originally thinking... When I thought surround house I thought they meant a VR room where all of the walls were covered with TVs so they could put you into a simulated world.

[caveman-jim]

there was something like that shown in the second half of last year, I want to say a company had a stupid number of displays hooked up to a bunch of firepro's to make two walls of a house type thing. I remember posting it here but I don't know what it was called so haven't found it in a search.