And a virtual window or two would have been especially helpful when I worked in a windowless basement office years ago. Or walking to the actual window. The realistic images and lighting can give the illusion of a window at first glance, but with this variety, the scenery never changes unless you switch out the photo, which doesn’t make for the most realistic window experience. They also offer image tiles that can be placed into standard ceiling grids and lit by ambient or custom front lighting. The company will custom build and install the units, and even shoot custom footage in some cases. They can even be made up of multiple monitors as individual panes. The latest demo version consists of two 46-inch (118.8-centimeter) Panasonic TC-P46G10 plasma monitors and an Apple Macintosh Pro running the custom-coded Winscape software, as well as an Xbox Kinect (model 1414) to track a person’s position relative to the screens. Once again, Sky Factory offers a variety of units that include one or more 40- to 46-inch (101.6- to 116.8-centimeter) 1080p high-definition LED edge-lit LCD monitors. They include window and mounting fixtures, a hard-drive based video playback unit (VPU) with around 8 hours of high-definition (either 1080p or UltraHD resolution) nature content and a wall mounted control panel to play, stop, pause and switch between scenes.

Various scenes are available for purchase from Winscape at $19.50 each for 1080p quality, and $60 for the few 4K resolution offerings. They include lots of San Francisco and other California scenes, as well as a few videos shot in Norway, Maui, Canada and Minnesota. The available nature footage is shot on either the RED One 4K or RED Epic 5K cameras, which have also been used to shoot theatrically released films, and they include a variety of lake, mountain, sky, ocean, river and other natural landscapes, as well as a balloon festival and an aquarium scene. Paper uses wood pulp from trees, while the manufacture of plastics requires the use of fossil fuels like oil and natural gas. The Open Window project mentioned earlier involved projecting still and moving artwork, nature scenes and images of personal interest onto the walls of the rooms of patients undergoing stem cell transplants — a procedure that requires weeks of isolation for the patient in a sterile, windowless room. I’d probably change them frequently while looking for a distraction from my normal computer monitor and my cloth-covered cubicle walls. Prepare and file invoices on your computer and send them via e-mail or electronic fax.

“The Mars community has long coveted the scientific value of sites such as Jezero Crater, and a previous mission contemplated going there, but the challenges with safely landing were considered prohibitive,” said Ken Farley, project scientist for Mars 2020 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This added propulsion allows the crewmember to clear the tail of the plane. The site also offers Winscape Marketeer software that allows for features like tracking of random viewers without calibration and timed video overlays, making marketing to passers by viable. This allows the citizens of the island to enjoy year-round local produce without the expense and delay of importation. By measuring electrons, protons and ions, IS☉IS will understand the particles’ lifecycles – where they came from, how they became accelerated and how they move out from the Sun through interplanetary space. This tracking makes all the difference, because with an actual window, the scenery changes as you move about the room.

The displayed scenery will also adjust accordingly when you move further away from or closer to the virtual windows. If you move to the left, you can see more of what’s to the right in the view, and if you move up, you can see more of the image below, and so on. In real life, clouds and birds move across the sky and leaves and other foliage flutter in the wind. It may be a way of reflecting on or releasing the stress of everyday life, or even an unconscious way of helping you unravel challenging experiences. Some even consider it a kind of Ur-guitar, from which all Les Pauls are descended. But on Earth, there are other forces to consider, chiefly gravity. But there is a newer type of virtual window that takes this into account. The experiment resulted in reduced anxiety and depression for patients participating in the project, compared with those without Open Window.