I’m currently pretty busy building out and managing the development of what may be the largest shared VR installation ever. It’s designed to surround up to about 25-30 people and they will be sharing a virtual experience, so while one person will be directing the experience in real-time, everyone else is along for the ride, so to speak. We don’t have the physical space yet to set this up, so I had to build a small-scale prototype for testing out the proof-of-concept and (assuming that goes well) to validate our rendering strategy. The first step was the monitors; Here’s 4 (we could not fit the desired 5) 4K 55″ monitors.
The next step is the PC hardware. We’re trying to determine exactly how many 4K displays we can drive from one beefy PC. Since the PC’s have special requirements, we’re specifying the hardware – a water cooled Intel Core i7 6700K CPU, 32GB memory, 1TB SSD, a water cooled Nvidia 980ti GPU. Here’s the parts;
So far it’s all come together pretty well. We’ve had multiple folks stop by to gawk at the displays – we have a synchronized scene running across all the monitors (which I can’t show yet). It’s starting to come together nicely. The 4K displays really do look pretty good. I can share that unfortunately that, no, one beefy PC can not handle 2x 4K displays running at 60fps. 30fps is pushing it. The final installation size is anywhere from 8 to 10 4K screens, all synchronized rendering different views of some out-of-this world scenes. Stay tuned for some in-game rendering when the project makes it’s public appearance.