The collaborations may play out on many levels. Guerin is building open source functionality into the Wall. This means that soon, students with just a basic understanding of programming will be able to submit their own ideas for applications, ensuring that the Wall becomes more than an expensive piece of colorful furniture. The potential applications are endless: An elegant take on the Periodic Table, a safari abroad, a visually appealing class project … any might find their way to pixilation.

Since ancient manuscripts were handwritten and often elaborately illustrated, the Wall’s extreme zoom-in function allows students and researchers to essentially get into the mind of the scribe who drew the work.

“Many students like creating digital exhibits in the Digital Media Center or as part of the Museum Studies Program,” says Choudhury. “There is a community of people thinking about how you display museum exhibits in an experiential way, interacting with them, perhaps moving through a space with them. They didn’t really have a prominent space to display them in a public and accessible way. Now there’s an awareness of new possibilities for highlighting these people’s work and creativity.”

Hager agrees. “The question is, ‘Can you create a self-sustaining cycle where students come in, have a good idea that is reasonable, doable, and has a good shot at success, and we have the human resources to help get their idea on the Wall?’” asks Hager. “As you see your ideas go up, others think, ‘That’s cool … I can do that.’ And then it becomes self-sustaining.”

But just being human turns out to be enough of an attribute to contribute to the Wall. For all its computational power (and the Wall’s databank can be expanded to handle some 30 terabytes of info), there are some forms of data sifting at which humans are superior.

Take visual recognition. For researchers studying pictures of the cosmos, a freshman with a sharp eye may spot a galaxy better than your average Dual-6 core Intel Xeon processor. So why not pop some slides from the Hubble Space Telescope on the Wall and let passing students have a go at it? That’s exactly what Guerin envisions.

“Computers are not so good at telling a galaxy—an oblong blurry dot—from a dot that’s a star. But humans, when trained, can pick it up. There’s an application called Galaxy Zoo, which gives you an image and let’s you know there are probably some galaxies in that image, and you get a score for each galaxy you find. Put that up on the Wall, and you’re actually doing real research for someone while you’re making it fun for the person at the Wall,” he says. “Laymen can actively contribute to active research in a measurable way using this type of system.”

Similarly, a project called Open Connectome, involving computer science Associate Professor Randal Burns, director of the Hopkins Storage Systems Lab, is parsing that densest of structures, the brain. Specifically, Open Connectome is looking at the way neurons talk to each other, perhaps the most complex series of communications known to man. Burns’ group has collected terabytes of rat neurons, which, when blown up, initially look like “a cross section of a redwood,” says Guerin. “They’re perfect to put up on the wall because a computer can’t always differentiate between neurons, especially when they branch out. But a reasonably trained person, who knows what it looks like when a tree branches, can bring that context to bear when identifying neurons. And if they have a little idle time while studying in the library, they could walk to the Wall, classify these neurons, and add real data to the field.”

The Wall’s developers see their $30,000 prototype as something that will become far more sophisticated over time. Right now its ability to interact with humans as they move in space is relatively crude, requiring people to move with slow, deliberate motions.

That could well change; imagine a design program where just a flick of the wrist would intuit a certain kind of brush stroke. Guerin has spent hours pondering such possibilities, to turn the Wall into a driver of interaction and design for industry.

“If you see the majority of interactive displays out there that are this size, they’re about content consumption; watching videos, viewing images. Even where you’re manipulating scientific data, you’re not creating,” says Guerin.

“But what’s the architectural firm, the mechanical engineering firm of 20 years from now, going to look like? Right now, in a good design firm, they have rooms with whiteboards where they share ideas. Eventually, there will be high-resolution display boards, like the Wall. And they want big. And the people who use them will want lots of functionality and not just pretty pictures. I want to build something that has interactivity as simple as the Kinect, but I want to have all 5,000 tools of Photoshop built in so I can use it for doing real stuff.”

Don’t be surprised if when that happens, the Wall is no longer interacting just with you but with other walls anywhere there’s connectivity. Scholars could share, discuss, and manipulate digital collections across continents. Architects could consult and rearrange complex models with clients, with neither side leaving their office. Even the humble PhD candidate could find that most traditional—and stress inducing—of academic rites of passage, the dissertation defense, forever altered. Need a certain expert in, say, London, to weigh in? “They could go to where a Wall is on their campus and participate,” says Choudhury. “And if you’re asked a question, rather than just speaking to the problem, you can say, ‘Let me show you how I would address that.’ Oh yes, I can see that happening.”

So can we.