Apple has set up the most astounding wall we’ve ever seen. It is filled with 30 24-inch Apple Cinema displays that are synchronized and powered by 30 Apple Mac Pro workstations is a Matrix movie like waterfall that displays the top 50,000 apps in the iTunes App Store.
An apps icon falls whenever that particular app is downloaded and the app is sorted in the display by its icon color. It takes 10,800 apps to fill one of the 30-inch displays completely.
Apple accomplished this eye catching hyperwall display using the previously mentioned Apple hardware, Mac OS X Snow Leopard and EVGA NVIDIA GTX 285 graphics cards. According to Apple:
“As apps are downloaded from the App Store, their data is coalesced via an XML feed every five minutes. Apps are sorted and scheduled using Cocoa and Objective-C. The data is then passed to an OpenCL kernel, which drives the animation. Quartz Composer brings all the technologies together and renders the final synchronized output using Quartz Composer Visualizer. ”
This isn’t the first year for the wall to appear at WWDC. It actually appeared at WWDC 2009, but at the time there were only 50,000 apps in the app store and now there are over 225,000. That wall displayed a pulsating canvas of app icons and each time someone purchased an app that apps icon would pulse. That pulse made the wall something to look at and this year is no different. It will definitely be interesting to see what Apple comes up with at WWDC 2011.
Check out this video to see this astounding and eye catching use of Apple hardware and software.
[via TechCrunch]
