CEBIT 2004 — HANNOVER, GERMANY — MARCH 18TH, 2004 — NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in visual processing solutions, has joined forces with leading German technology institute Fraunhofer-IGD to equip the world’s largest interactive digital display, the HEyeWall Powerwall with Quadro FX technology. A 15 stereo-screen incarnation of this technology (which is expandable up to a 24-screen, three-by-five-metre display) will be unveiled by the German Chancellor, Mr. Schroeder, for the first time today, at the CeBIT trade fair in Hannover.

The HEyeWall Powerwall is a state-of-the-art digital display system which allows the projection of very high-resolution digital images of a quality which cannot be matched by standard projection systems. The HEyeWall system can use a virtually unlimited number of projectors, each one ‘driven’ by its own Quadro-equipped PC. The original installation in Darmstadt has 48 projectors and a pixel resolution of more than 18 Megapixel.

The HEyeWall Powerwall is modular in construction, with each module housing two standard projectors and two commercially-available PCs. The version which will be unveiled today by Chancellor Schroeder incorporates 15 modules, arranged in a ‘three-by-five’ rectangular display.

Developed by a team from the Virtual and Augmented Reality department of Fraunhofer-IGD, a division of the leading German research institute, Fraunhofer (a $1 billion organisation with more than 13,000 employees), the HEyeWall Powerwall can exist in almost any form, from a single module up to and beyond the existing 24-screen construction which stands 2.4 metres tall and 4.8 metres wide. Even at its largest size, the 18 megapixel (6,144 x 3,072 pixel) resolution allows for the delivery of extraordinarily clear images, irrespective of the viewer’s angle.

“It is a great tribute to the power of the Quadro technology that it has been chosen as the graphics-processing foundation for this extraordinary application of technology,” says Walter Mundt-Blum, director of workstation sales, EMEA at NVIDIA. “It is a testament to the development team’s technological achievements that Chancellor Schroeder has chosen to perform today’s unveiling and we are very proud to have been able to assist them in their efforts to bring the system to this point.”

The NVIDIA Quadro® FX family of workstation graphics products takes the leading computer-aided design (CAD) and digital content creation (DCC) applications to a new level of interactivity by enabling unprecedented capabilities in programmability and precision. Full 128-bit floating-point precision delivers the industry's highest workstation quality and, for the first time, styling and production rendering become integral functions of the design workflow, shortening the production process and enabling faster time to market. Based on a foundation of quality engineering, NVIDIA Quadro FX delivers blistering application performance and unmatched features and image quality to desktop and mobile platforms.

The HEyeWall Powerwall is designed to be of benefit to any industry which has applications based on complex data or objects and which has a need to display these in a high-resolution environment. A variety of possible fields of application result from this: from efficient product development to the visualisation of highly-structured 3D areas such as city models. No matter what the application, the HEyeWall system opens up completely new vistas for the presentation of complex information. Further information is available from http://www.heyewall.de.