Control your visualization with the Force

How do you want to interact with your visualization today? If it's running on a system that uses the Texas Advanced Computing Center's DisplayCluster environment, you have a lot of options. You can touch the screen, use an iPhone, tablet computer, or even a Wii remote. Or you can roll like Yoda, and use the Force.

Well, actually, it's not the Force. It's a technology called Kinect, originally created for Xbox, that processes the gestures you make without touching any devices and interprets them as commands for the screen. But the similarity to films such as Minority Report or the Star Wars Trilogy are too obvious to miss, which is probably what led the TACC team to include a scene in this video they displayed at SC11 in Seattle earlier this month. In the video, a man uses Kinect to recreate a scene from Empire Strikes Back, in which Yoda uses the Force to life an X-Wing starfighter from a swamp.

DisplayCluster can, of course, do far more than assist in making cute pop culture references. It's designed to be a collaborative environment for tiled displays. As such it supports multiple gigapixel images, multiple methods of manipulation, and can be used across both Linux and Mac OS X.