APRIL 2019 • LONGISLANDPRESS.COM 27
REALITY DECK
THE BIG PICTURE
By CLAUDE SOLNIK
On the third floor of a futuristic glass
and steel building at Stony Brook
University, researchers in a 30-foot
by 40-foot space see something midway
between a microscope’s image
and a movie theater.
The Reality Deck is a space covered
with 416 27-inch Samsung screens,
each with 4 million pixels, that immerse
scientists inside images that
make a high-resolution TV look like a
Model T Ford. The screens’ 1.5 billion
pixels, like living, thinking grains of
sand, provide visual information, so
scientists can see and understand microscopic
mysteries, from medicine to
astronomy, from deep inside E. coli
molecules to the Milky Way.
“This is the largest in the world,”
Project Director Arie
Kaufman, who created
the Reality Deck,
says.
The room is inside
Stony Brook’s Center
of Excellence in
Wireless and Information
Technology, a
100,000-square-foot
high-tech facility honeycombed
with computer and virtual
reality labs.
“There’s probably more data collected
in the last two or three years than
in the entire history of the human
race,” CEWIT Executive Director
Dr. Satya Sharma adds. “When you
collect that much data, how do you
make sense out of it? One way is to
visualize it."
CEWIT researchers are doing cutting
edge work on everything from
virtual reality to machine learning
and healthcare to driverless cars.
Researchers from NASA to neurobiologists
can look at medical applications,
astronomy, drug design,
architecture, transportation, storm
surges, climate change, clean room
applications, and power plant design.
“Typically, in a microscope, you don’t
see that much. Here we can look at
things and we can make sense,”
Sharma says. “If you want to kill a
molecule, we can look at which atoms
you need to work on. It’s a data display
device, looking at minute details.”
Almost 7 miles of cable and 3,000
components including more than
800 connectors tie together the panels
near the building’s air conditioning’s
units.
It’s named after the Holodeck, a fictional
virtual reality room in the Star
Trek series, but this is all science and
not fiction.
“We wanted something similar to the
Holodeck, a futuristic environment,”
Kaufman says. “We have this real
thing you can touch and see.”
PRESS BUSINESS
Arie Kaufman inside The Reality Deck.
(Photo by Colin McGuire)
Tickets are $100 per person in advance
Save the Date:
Annual Golf &
Tennis Tournament,
August 1
at North Hills
County Club
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