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Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that's an incredible pixel density. At what point does it start to approximate reality? For instance, is this enough that if you put one of these panels on the wall displaying a high resolution image, it could look like an ordinary window out into real life?

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In terms of what you can visually resolve this is overkill; you only need ~300dpi at 18" to be beyond the resolving power of the average human eye.

But if you want to make a window you have to do something else entirely; your display has to show a holographic interference pattern at which point when it is illuminated correctly you can achieve a full parallax, full color, glasses free 3D display. In both theory and practice you can do this with an LCD but to start getting RGB capabilities you would need some incredible pixel densities on the order of 30,000dpi.

Some people are not average. Some people are extremely near-sighted.

One word: parallax.

If you don't move in front of it, possibly; but the fact that humans have depth perception will tend to spoil the illusion a bit.

This might seem a bit sad, but one of my dreams is to replace a wall of my suburban Australian house with an edge-to-edge video screen that looks like a portal to a hi-def (seemingly live) scene of Utah. Sun rises. Weather rolls in. Sun starts to set. Animals wander past, etc. That would be some serious escapism for me when I don't have the time/money to justify the flights. So far, the best option has been wandering around Red Dead Redemption on a big TV...

Save the money and buy the flights. You don't need to justify a dream. I drive across the US once or twice a year to camp in the deserts of Utah and it is, indeed, a trip of a lifetime. My photos are here:

https://www.instagram.com/desertdefender/

and some more here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/defender90/albums/721576335549... https://www.flickr.com/photos/defender90/albums/721576262049... https://www.flickr.com/photos/defender90/albums/721576252403...

Nice shots!

I have a wife and three young kids. I either have to burden my wife solo with the kids or I'm paying for five return flights plus car hire which means visits start at $10k/trip so are a bit tougher than they used to be pre-kids. My domestic dream is for when panels come way down in price so that a wall of screens is a done thing!

I've visited Southern Utah maybe 5-6 times from Australia, so far. Ideally I'd visit annually - my other dream is to run a regular tour taking Australians over and showing them around, mostly as an excuse for me visiting again and again! I tell people it's probably the best density for natural attractions in the world.

This is not all Utah, but includes a reasonable amount of it: http://www.isaacforman.com.au/outdoors/

Nah, you'd need to emulate the depth and lighting of a real window before anyone would mistake a screen as reality.

I imagine color gamut and brightness is a bigger issue for that.

> At what point does it start to approximate reality?

When you can cram a few billion pixels onto the head of a pin.

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