高清电视屏幕墙

Some walls can be windows into a world we can hardly imagine, the exquisite details of the stone-mason's craft, the mind-bending world of fractals, with the shapes may shrink, but they're all the same. Or the very blueprint of what we are all made of, a strand of DNA.

"You can immerse yourself in your data, you know, you could do that in 3D, this software, and the VisWall have 3D capabilities." In this case, a churning twister, eat your heart out Hollywood. "You can try to describe the birth of a tornado in words are, we spent, having a very powerful 3D animation. I mean, the images speak for themselves."

Measuring 14 by 8 feet, this video behemoth is known as "the VisWall". You can't get it at Best Buy though, you have to go to the Tufts University in a place called the Center for Scientific Visualization. With support from the National Science Foundation, Lionel Zupan helped bring the VisWall to life. The VisWall uses two rare screen projectors to display a picture four times the resolution of the best HD TV. Four times! Faculty and students from many disciplines use it. For example, a surgeon develops software so her students can practice their technique without cutting any tissue.

"I can feel the texture itself and I can change instruments, so here I can actually cut, so I'm gonna try to rub the tumor."

Mathematician Boris Hasselblatt went to the wall to get a fresh view of a model that forecasts the population growth of certain animals and even though he has studied this for twenty years, what he bounced things off the wall, he saw something he had never seen before. "What's apparent at this scale ,with this resolution and detail and being at eye-height as well, is that all the curves of this sort seemed to be meeting right here." It turns out those curves indicate chaotic conditions. "That, I think, is one of the great things about this wall that, in fact, will get people to see things that, otherwise hard to see."

These simulations and animations are just scratching the surface of the wall. Imagine what it would be like when we can get one of these babies at home.

For Science Nation, I am Miles O'Brien.