ViSUS Gigapixel David: One billion polygons to billions of pixels
*Update for iOS 8*
Welcome to the first gigapixel, multi-view rendering of The Digital Michelangelo Projects David. With this app you can explore a digital scan of the statue of David, examining the drill marks and scratches found in the original statue, as well as a missing triangle or two from the scan. Simply use two fingers to pinch and zoom in and out. The buttons on the side give you access to the information screen, reset the viewpoint, as well as access to the four different rendered views.
*Must have WiFi or 3G or better service to interact with view *
The David model consists of 933 million triangles from a laser-scan of the original statue created by Professor Marc Levoy and members of The Digital Michelangelo Project at Stanford University. The original data is made of 8 million polygons, each about 2.0 mm in size, smaller than the thickness of 2 dimes.
Each of the four views presented in this Gigapixel David app consist of 2-gigapixel sized frames (29280 x 70416 pixels) rendered using the Manta Interactive Ray Tracer by researchers at the Scientific Computing Institute (SCI) at the University of Utah. In all, each frame took 30 hours to render using 64 cores each (256 total) of the SCI Institutes 264 core SGI UV 1000 with 2.8TB of RAM and 2.67GHz Intel Xeon X7542 cores. More information on Manta can be found at: http://mantawiki.sci.utah.edu/manta/index.php/Main_Page
The final rendering is stored in using ViSUS raw data format enabling efficient, streaming pipelines that process the information while in movement. This technology enables real-time management of large datasets on a variety of systems ranging from desktops and laptop computers to portable devices such as iPhones/iPads. ViSUS has been deployed in a variety of large data applications such as the monitoring of large scientific simulations and the editing of massive images and panoramas.
The ViSUS Gigapixel David viewer is also currently available as a Windows web browser plugin (Firefox and Chrome) or as a standalone application for Windows, Max OS X, or OpenSUSE, available via http://www.sci.utah.edu/visus.html