The Geowall is essentially two digital projectors, a projector screen, and a desktop PC with a powerful graphics card that allows the projectors to show quad-buffered stereo images and movies. Also key to the Geowall design is PORTABILITY - the system can be disassembled in several minutes, transported either in a cart, car, on a plane, then reassembled in situ. The figure below shows the essential components of the SIO Geowall:

Geowall hardware

Further to what is illustrated above are:

• a signal splitter that allows the use of a flat screen monitor to easily navigate content. The splitter is needed because the PC has only 2 VGA outputs (and we need three with the addition of the flat screen monitor).
• the desktop PC.
• a broadband connection to the internet. This is required for some of the software that we run on the system.

Desktop PC

Our desktop PC has a 2GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor with1GB RAM. The system software is dual-boot Windows XP and Linux RedHat 7.0. Much of the software available runs on both systems. Many Geowall's have also been built with Mac OSX installed.

Projectors

We currently use two InFocus DPL 530 digital projectors. The are reconditioned, making them far cheaper that buying brand-new projectors. You can buy reconditioned projectors from projectorpoint.com. We also bought a custom built stacker, that allows the projectors to be positioned on top of one another.

Graphics Card

The graphics card we use is an nVidia Quadro 4 128MB 750XGL. This card is built for professional 3-D presentations on multiple displays (essentially what we have with the Geowall, although the displays are superimposed).

Projector Screen

Our projector screen is a front-projection Da Lite silver surface screen. Due to the projector light being polarized, the screen must preserve the polarization to allow stereo viewing.

If you wish to look at other designs of Geowalls in different institutions, visit the Geowall website.