Writes the High Perfomance Computing and Visualisation department of the University of Groningen:
Scientists can now use our new enormous multitouch screen. […] We turned our existing 3D theatre with a big cylindrical screen into one that can detect 100+ simultaneous touches. We mostly used off-the-shelf hardware components and public domain software. Apparently size does matter and the result is really impressive.
[…]
Now we have such a touch screen we can use it for driving our existing software, but the initial goal was to facilitate the scientists studying Geographic Information Systems and a research group that studies interaction methods for touch screens. Having such a huge screen changes the way people interact with data and with each other. They could easily work on part of the screen in their own little environment but could switch very fast to a more collaborative approach.
This map shows the fake island kingdom the Netherlands could be if its geography fully followed its politics. In the real world, top left dogs Nijmegen and Groningen are separated by 200 kilometres, as are right wing islands Kessel and Urk.
The two regions that in reality do exist as geographical areas are the Bible Belt and the Rode Regio, an area that used to have a lot of communists, basically the Groningen country-side.
I can vouch for the position of Nijmegen, having lived there for ten years. Nijmegen’s and Groningen’s progressive and left-wing attitude may at least in part have to do with a large student body, making up ten percent of the population in the case of Nijmegen. Would the Catholic church have thought that when they started their university there in the 1920s as a bulwark against socialist forces?
