Liquid Galaxy in School
James
I wanted to start by thanking everyone on here for your posts, I have
set a small LG setup at my school for temporary uses but all the
information I have been able to glean from your posts have been
helpful. I work in a K-6 school as a information literacy teacher in
my school's library. Last week before school vacation, I was able to
do a small setup using projectors and three screens. Though not as
impressive as many of the rigs I have seen, it fit my needs well.
Using this setup I did a lesson using the book make way for ducklings,
showing kindergarten students the city of Boston as we followed the
ducks journey. The setup was not the neatest thing but it worked. I
used 3 Mac Minis and 3 projectors/screens and a macbook pro as the
master computer. I am using GE5 though I would am probably going to
update to 6 when I get a chance/courage to do so. I am not an expert
with coding by any means this project was fun and challenging.
Here are some pictures of my setup.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ptN7lWPLxDQ/TRiw1xHyKII/AAAAAAAABQI/9xavi9M_XH0/s1600/IMG_0198.JPG
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ptN7lWPLxDQ/TRiw77jZcFI/AAAAAAAABQM/kc39lcXebk8/s1600/IMG_0193.JPG
I posted a video of the setup at my blog that I just started.
http://macintegration.blogspot.com
Thanks again,
James
Marcel Wijnberger
James Crawford
I could convince the school to spend the money to let me build an LG
rig with full LCD displays but I would gladly borrow someone's!
One issue I had was I couldn't really form a curved screen for full
immersion and I had to deal with overlaps and other projection
issues. Otherwise it was great and people loved the fact that I could
do it without having to go buy expensive software or equipment.
On Dec 27, 5:32 pm, Marcel Wijnberger <m.wijnber...@gmail.com> wrote:
> James,
>
> looks nice
>
> why did you choose the beamers ?
>
> i thought it was best to use the lcd and not the beamers. not sure why but
> it looks like beamers wil do also
>
> again: nice and keep up the good work !
>
> > Greetings all,
>
> > I wanted to start by thanking everyone on here for your posts, I have
> > set a small LG setup at my school for temporary uses but all the
> > information I have been able to glean from your posts have been
> > helpful. I work in a K-6 school as a information literacy teacher in
> > my school's library. Last week before school vacation, I was able to
> > do a small setup using projectors and three screens. Though not as
> > impressive as many of the rigs I have seen, it fit my needs well.
> > Using this setup I did a lesson using the book make way for ducklings,
> > showing kindergarten students the city of Boston as we followed the
> > ducks journey. The setup was not the neatest thing but it worked. I
> > used 3 Mac Minis and 3 projectors/screens and a macbook pro as the
> > master computer. I am using GE5 though I would am probably going to
> > update to 6 when I get a chance/courage to do so. I am not an expert
> > with coding by any means this project was fun and challenging.
>
> > Here are some pictures of my setup.
>
>
> >http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ptN7lWPLxDQ/TRiw77jZcFI/AAAAAAAABQM/kc39lcX...
Andrew Leahy
The projectors are a fine choice when you need to create a large viewing space.
With the kids seated on the floor was the screen height okay?
Did you have any problems with anyone getting motion sickness or vertigo!?
On Mac's with GE there's no proper full-screen mode, however if you
place GE on the second display port (but I'm guessing Mini's only have
one display) you won't have the Finder Menu. Another work-around is to
shorten the screens and place the top menu bar just out of view on the
black screen edge... I've done that before!
Also depending on your Internet connectivity and local caching
policies, you could benefit from setting up a local HTTP cache (like
Squid) on the controlling Macbook and proxy'ing the requests from the
Mini's. This will create a larger, hopefully more permanent, tile/data
cache then the 2Gb on each of the GE clients. If you have questions I
can give you (& the list) advice on how to do this.
If you get interest from the School, before talking about screens, I
would arrange to purchase a 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator mouse (it works
with GE on Linux/Mac/Windows). It makes moving around in GE more fluid
and 'natural', you may even be able to hand over control to some of
the kids.
Cheers, Andrew
eResearch Advisor / Uni of Western Sydney
On 28 December 2010 09:46:56 UTC+11, James Crawford
--
"Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know." (Lao Tzu)
My household GHG emissions from energy & transport ~4kg CO2e/day or
~1.4tonnes/year
Household daily use of Water 110L, Electricity 3.9kWh, Petrol 1.2L, Gas 0MJ
James Crawford
Thanks for the comments. The screen height was fine for the kids in
front of the screens, any lower and I would have had heads showing
up. The only complaints of motion sickness was from the adults! the
kids loved it and most of the travel was local "hops". Adults had
issues when we were hopping from state to state or further distances.
The finder menu didn't cause that much of an issue but thanks for the
suggestions, the mini just has one output, but I like the idea of
putting the finder menu off the screen.
Each of the Mac minis are networked computers that I moved to set this
up. One of the IT people at my school setup a network account for me
to do this trial. I somewhat understand what you are describing with
Squid setup but I honestly don’t know that much and how it would
affect the computers that I am using. I would be interested in
learning more, as I am going to replicate this lesson with multiple
classes and would love to have the imagery load faster. The school is
setup with a fiber optic connection and gigabit switches that I can
connect to.
Also if I upgrade to GE 6, is the setup the same or do I have to make
any changes to codes? Again, this is my first time trying something
like this and I appreciate all the help and guides people have
provided.
Thanks for suggestions and if you wouldn’t mind emailing me the
details about setting up a local HTTP cache, I will see if it is
possible for me to do.
James
Andrew Leahy
I mostly solved the 'going to' motion problem by maintaining a
horizontal horizon as the rig flys to the next search/location, so it
really does feel like a gigantic hop! I'll have to post a video. Also
the Space Navigator let's you move slowly and naturally around the
scene.
The config for LiquidGalaxy in GE6 is the same as GE5. Make a copy of
/Applications/Google\ Earth.app/Contents/MacOS/drivers.ini,
install/upgrade to GE6, then copy'n'paste the changes you made for
your LG setup from the old drivers.ini into the new drivers.ini
You will need administrator (root) access on the machine you install
Squid (I'd suggest the Macbook) and some hard drive capacity, say
10-20Gb for the cache. Installing a basic Squid server is straight
forward, I used http://squid3.darwinports.com/
On the Mini's there's nothing special to do, besides setting network
proxies to point at the Macbook. That can be configured each time you
use them for your setup. System Preferences -> Network -> Ethernet ->
Advanced -> Proxies -> Web Proxy (HTTP)...
I'm back at uni next week and I can send a squid config I use. You can
use http://code.google.com/p/liquid-galaxy/source/browse/trunk/gnu_linux/etc/squid/squid.conf
although it does a bit more than you'll need.
BTW OS X 10.7 will have a better fullscreen mode for apps, so that may
help with GE.
Cheers, Andrew.
On 29 December 2010 06:34:43 UTC+11, James Crawford