If you’ve ever looked at your Comcast bill and thought, “That seems expensive!”, don’t worry. The company used some of your money it to put the biggest video wall I ever did see inside its corporate headquarters in Philadelphia. And can you really blame a company for using your money to build a giant TV?

Maybe, maybe not. The point is that the 2,100-foot HD video wall is actually five times HD resolution, which is so HD that Comcast can’t even show actual content the entire thing unless the content is produced especially for such a gigantic screen. Check out the above video for a look at some of the entertainment, as it were.

Here’s the low-down about the giant screen, called the Comcast Experience Video Wall, from the Greater Philadelphia tourism website:

The Comcast Experience Video Wall is the largest four-millimeter LED screen in the world.

Spanning 83.3 feet wide by 25.4 feet high, the 2,100 square-foot video wall brings spectacular original programming to visitors 18 hours a day.

The wall displays thousands of unique hours of programming, created exclusively for The Comcast Experience Video Wall.

Utilizing a technique called “3-Camera Panorama,” which involves placing three high-definition cameras side-by-side and filming everything from spectacular nature footage to urban landscapes, a seamless, wide-screen vista is created.

This realistic imagery offers 10 million pixels of clarity — five times the resolution of hi-definition TV — supplemented with computer-generated images of amazingly realistic quality, producing a vivid virtual world.

The system that delivers the content to the screen has the ability to make a pre-designed selection from a bank of hundreds of images. The selection from the delivery system is random in nature, in order to create an array of ever-changing imagery.

More geeky Philadelphia stuff…

Jeff Victor of STARFLEET, the International Star Trek Fan Association, recently showed me around the 12,500-foot Star Trek exhibit at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute. We laughed, we cried, we played a little Dabo. Good times indeed.

Star Trek at the Franklin Institute [FI.edu]

STARFLEET International Star Trek Fan Association [SFI.org]

More geeky Philadelphia stuff…

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Derrick Pitts, lead astronomer at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, talks about the telescope used in the Bloom Observatory. The 10-inch refractor telescope has been around since 1934, and was built by Carl Zeiss Jena and shipped over from Germany.

Here’s more from the Franklin Institute’s web site:

The original observatory, opened in 1934, had two telescopes. The 10-inch, f/15 refractor, built by Carl Zeiss Jena, employed the latest optical and engineering techniques available in pre-World War II Germany. The 24-inch reflector telescope, manufactured by J.W. Fecker of Pittsburgh, was a convertible Newtonian/Cassegrain instrument with focal ratios of 14.4 and 7, respectively. The reflector was used for deep-sky observations, including the first recovery sighting of Comet Halley in the fall of 1985. City light pollution eventually rendered it ineffective, and the scope was moved to the Institute’s Space Command exhibit.
Bloom Observatory was renovated in 2006. Nationally-recognized telescope mechanic, Christopher Ray, of Ray Museum Studios and a professor of Mechanical Engineering from Swarthmore College, completely rebuilt the Zeiss refractor, upgrading it with modern PC-controlled DC-servo drives to achieve GO-TO pointing accuracy of better than 0.2 arc-seconds on both axes. The upgrade enables visitors to see not only the only the usual, but also thousands of faint objects (down to about magnitude 13)–despite high levels of ambient light pollution.

Joel N Bloom Observatory [FI.edu]

More geeky Philadelphia stuff…

The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia is currently running a Star Trek exhibit with all sorts of whimsical items from the various TV shows and movies. A few devices, in particular, look mighty familiar to present-day gadgets.

Please observe the two Engineering PADDs (personal access display device) in the above photo. I’ll be damned if those don’t bear a striking resemblance to Amazon’s Kindle and Kindle DX e-book readers. The PADD, however, is set way, way off in the future — circa 2375, according to the little sign there. It appears that in the future they have color e-ink, too.

Then below we have a Cardassian Data Clip, described as a “portable storage and data processing device”. It’s roughly the size and shape of a 2.5-inch portable hard drive enclosure.

And this “data display panel” could double as a digital photo frame or, perhaps more appropriately, one of those 7-inch USB LCD monitors. Except this one is much cooler looking and wireless.

Starfleet Communicator? Hello Motorola Ming. The Ming has a stylus, though, which Kirk would have lost on day one. “Captain’s log… I’ve… lost… my… po-king… apparatus!”

And last but not least, there’s the Tricorder, “an advanced scientific device used by Starfleet personnel” to monitor medical conditions and search for signs of life, among other things. Kinda resembles a wireless router, which is used to search for and monitor advanced scientific stuff like LOLcats and hot deals on Wolf T-shirts.

Star Trek: The Exhibition [Franklin Institute, Philadelphia]

More geeky Philadelphia stuff…