JD Pirtle, 35, held a paintbrush up to his chin, and like a traditional painter, contemplated what he was going to paint that day.

But he wasn’t using any paint and he wasn’t even using a canvas.

Instead, he just walked up to a wall comprised of HD screens. With a flick of the wrist and a light stroke, he began painting a sunflower on the virtual wall.

“I like to call it 20-foot canvas,” said Pirtle, who is earning his masters degree in fine arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is the lead artist on the paint project.

Students have built a wall out of 18 HD screens with an astounding number of pixels: 8160 x 2304. A comparable single screen comprises 1920 x 1080 pixels. But wait, it gets better. This summer, a group of five students made the wall touch-enabled and created an application for the iPad that allows more than one person to paint on the virtual wall.

Electronic Visualization Laboratory nurtures the partnership between artists and computer scientists specializing in advanced visualization and networking technologies.

Think back “a long time ago [1977] in a galaxy far, far away” – EVL worked on the computer animation used in the creation of Star Wars.

“One of the reasons I came to this university is because it has a collaboration between engineers and artists,” said Pirtle.

Arthur Nishimoto, 23, is a graduate computer science student at EVL. Having worked a great deal with TacTile, a touch-enabled table composed of one HD screen, Nishimoto served as an advisor on making the wall touch sensitive.

EVL is known for developing new technologies using already available products. And the touch-enabled wall is no different. “We took our own ideas and adapted them to commercial devices,” Nishimoto said.

The team used touch overlay technology – a frame that one places around the outside of an LCD or plasma display which then makes the screen touch sensitive. When the team got the touch frames, it was Nishimoto’s responsibility to evaluate the technology.

“One challenge was getting the hardware to work,” Nishimoto said.

While TacTile operates based on optical technology – cameras track the touches – the wall works a bit differently he said. The wall uses infrared light that is emitted and detected to recognize touches. When a finger – or any other object – interferes with the infrared light rays, the wall acknowledges a touch.

While Nishimoto has even developed videogames that can be played on the wall, most recently he, Pirtle and undergraduate computer science student Philip Pilosi, 22, have been working on “20-foot canvas,” an unofficial name for the unnamed paint project.

Pirtle designed an application for the iPad that turns it into a painter’s palette. The wall picks up 32 touches simultaneously, which allows for the creation of a mural. But at the moment, the single holder of the iPad controls the color that is painted on the wall.

The painter’s palette that Pirtle designed allows the user to choose between 16 different colors and even mix them to come up with custom colors just as a traditional painter would. Also, one can choose their tool of choice, a pencil or a paintbrush, depending on the artistic requirements of the masterpiece to-be.

But how does the information on the iPad reach the wall? That’s where Pilosi came in. The iPad and the wall are connected over a wireless network he said. “It takes the color and breaks it into a string of characters and sends it over the wireless network to the wall.”

The touch overlays were supplied by PQ Labs, a Silicon Valley-based company that provides multi-touch solutions. Wei Liu, vice president of business development for PQ Labs said that the way EVL has assembled the screens is unlike anything he’s seen.

“It’s a revolutionary solution for the large size,” he said. “I think it’s a great project.”