Hiperwall

Hiperwall began as a research project funded by the National Science Foundation at the University of California, Irvine in 2004. The goal was to build the world’s highest resolution (at the time) tiled display wall, more commonly known as a video wall.

It was built to enable scientific visualization on an unprecedented scale, and we regularly showed imagery and data sets that measured hundreds of millions of pixels and gigabytes of data.

The first Hiperwall system was a pretty impressive collection of hardware for 2005, with 50 processors (more were added later), 50 GB of RAM, more than 10 TB of storage (we got a gift of 5TB worth of drives for our RAID system from Western Digital), and 50 of the nicest monitors available, but it was the software that really made it special. We named the project HIPerWall, which is an acronym for Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Wall. We took that interactivity seriously, so we didn’t just want to be able to show a 400 million pixel image of a rat brain, but we wanted to allow users to pan and zoom the image to visually explore the content. This user interactivity set the HIPerWall software apart from the other tiled display software available at the time and is still a major advantage over competing systems.

From the start, we designed the system to be highly interactive and flexible, and we used parallel and distributed computing techniques to provide the high-performance visualization required to drive a 200-million-pixel display system.

Where interactivity becomes essential is when a crisis arises or new information from a new source needs to be displayed urgently. Because our software is designed for easy interactivity, a system operator can quickly place the new source or image anywhere on the wall and even replicate it to multiple walls. Because of the interactive design features built into Hiperwall software, the ability to manipulate content is ready when our customers need it.

Video Wall Solutions

Hiperwall offers several ways you can buy Hiperwall software tailored to your needs.