The Computer

Because they had previous experience, we decided to go with Reason Computers in Minnesota.  The final computer cost us $3594.

Essentially, there's nothing too special about the Geowall computer.  It's a regular desktop, beefed up to handle graphics and fast processing.  The one key element is the video-card, which must have dual video outputs.  It is these outputs that will make projecting different images for the left and right eye possible. 

We chose the NVIDIA PNY Quadro 4-750 128 MB DDR Twin.  In order to run large graphics applications and render very large datasets, we had 2048 MB of DIMM RAM installed, as well as a quick 1.6GHz dual-processor.

Dual Video Output Seen Here

We also purchased a 15" flat panel computer monitor which allows us to use the computer without needing to project the screen.  The LCD screen projects polarized light, which means that if you are wearing the polarizing glasses you will only be able to see the monitor with one eye. 

The Computer Interface: Monitor, Keyboard, Mouse

We originally intended to have two operating systems on the computer.  We had Windows 2000 preinstalled and were going to install Linux on the second hard-drive.  Although we haven't done this yet, when and if we do, we will make use of the two hard-drives that we have, installing one OS on each, and making the Linux drive a slave to the Windows drive.

From Russ Burdick:
best bet is to use one drive for windows (the primary master hd) and the other for linux (make it the primary slave hd). the windows drive can go pretty much however you want, but linux can read+write to fat partitions (all flavors) and only read from ntfs. this means that you'll probably want to split it so that you've got a ntfs partition for the win2k install (which linux can read, not write) and the rest of the drive fat32 so that linux can read and write to it. the second hard drive should be partitioned with a small partition at the begining for /boot (around 100MB would be more than enough), a fairly large partition for / (around 15GB), almost everything else for a 'work' area (typically we mount this one at /usr/share/demos and make it most of the rest of the disk, so about 62GB), and then the remaining 2GB should be for a swap partition. linux wont let you make larger than a 2gb swap partition last i checked, so you'll probably want to adjust the size of the 'work' partition until you have around or slightly less than 2gb left at the end. optionally, you can do only three partitions with the same 100MB /boot partition and 2BG swap, but make the remainder /.

Complete Specs from Reason Computers:

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