Displays, Big Displays, and Lots of Displays

Chuck House, Co-Founder of AstroVirtual Inc

Good day to you all.  This is the inaugural post for a new blog for AstroVirtual Inc. 

Scott Futryk and I formed AstroVirtual Inc. in March 2023, and yes, we’ve been having fun. 

AstroVirtual is dedicated to the premise that displays—big displays and lots of them—help humans to process information faster and more reliably. But big displays, even though the costs have been reduced dramatically, pose challenges of installation, operation, and maintenance. And, critically, they are physically site-specific, so a user has to go to them. Most high-tech professionals are currently and properly excited by the promise and capability of Artificial Intelligence (AI), including us. In a world being transformed by AI, we are constantly being amazed by the speed of computation previously unimaginable.   

But the fact remains that we, as humans, are still the deciding factor, and fast data search is an adjunct, not the decision. And big data, with all of its mystique and glamour, has proven to be an elusive data warehouse of potential rather than ‘the answer’ as well. So we have sought to address some ‘missing links’ for the effective use of ‘big-display war-rooms’

·      Virtual instead of Physical,  with ‘no limits’ to the number and quality of the displays

·      Immersive 3-D ‘look-and-feel’ so you are ‘in the picture’

·      Available from a Web Browser anywhere anytime to anyone with proper permissions

·      Enhanced Visual Graphics for ‘Big Data’ analysis

·      Integrating AI techniques with Graphical Analytics, especially for predictive activity.

This blog will explore and discuss each of these points from a variety of perspectives, in regular posts, each of which will cover one or two aspects of these versatile tools.

I’ve been in the Computer Graphics and Imaging business for virtually a lifetime.   I designed and built the HP 1300A in 1966, the first directed-beam graphics display commercially sold by any computer vendor, earning David Packard’s singular award, the Medal of Defiance. This HP graphics display, released in January 1967, preceded IBM equivalent offerings by four years, and DEC by eleven. Scott has decades of entrepreneurial roles with Computer Graphics and gaming tools for business financial analytics. Early, he spent fifteen years at Hewlett-Packard (where we met) hosting the Computer Major Accounts seminars and programs. After years of customer requests for ‘inexpensive, effective war-rooms’ that were impractical at the time, he spent two decades pioneering methods to serve those needs.  

We joined in 2020 to pioneer some specific graphical interpretive methods for analyzing voluminous COVID data from InnovaScapes Institute https://www.innovascapesinstitute.com/ had compiled.  That work led to requirements for multiple simultaneous big displays, and eventually to the mission for a new company, AstroVirtual Inc. https://www.astrovirtual.com/

AstroVirtual Milestones:

 March 2023

·      Company incorporated

 September 2023

·      First public presentation, United Nations General Assembly, Digital Health Symposium # 3.

 March 2024

·      22 patent claims allowed (US # 11,935,135 B1) for “browser-based 3D immersive environments”

·      Public demonstration, World Health Forum, Padua, Italy

 June 2024

·      Classroom teaching demonstration, Innovation Value Institute, Leixlip, Ireland

 September 2024

·       2nd UNGA presentation for COVID studies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV-7NSYLd7c

 December 2024

·      Workshop, Innovation Value Institute, Leixlip, Ireland

·      Multiple patent claims, with 24 allowed diagrams (US # 12,165,263 B1)

So, some nice milestones.  AstroVirtual is barely started, though. We’re learning a lot about the added value of multiple displays.  My intent with this blog is to post regularly, even weekly.  What might we say?   Well, for starters, we will describe incremental milestones, and some interesting findings.  

 Such as:

·      What’s an environment?

·      What does it provide, that you cannot do otherwise

·      Show a business application

·      Show an ‘honors’ application

·      What was the COVID demonstration?

·      What does it take for someone to ‘get started’?

·      Seems expensive—is it?

·      How do you select the ‘right’ environment?

·      Who builds it? Where does the content come from?

 We’ve already surfaced myriad questions that this novel display capability allows. Because it is a ‘horizontal technology’ it is finding applications in multiple and very diverse situations.

 Stay tuned . . .  and thank you for your interest!