Seamless Video Walls

ahfoo writes "A company called Seamless Display is shopping around a new way of hiding the seams in video walls that mostly relies on modifiying video drivers to achieve its effects. According to their press release they hide the edges between monitors with a bit of plastic film and compress the video at the edges to produce a more or less seamless image. " Really bizarre, but it looks interesting.

Comments

Folding LCD screens

[Brahmastra]

The best application for consumers looks like the folding LCD displays. It would be great to have handhelds with a folding screen without a perceptible seam. Finally it won't suck to play games on handhelds.

Interesting, but

[Oculus Habent]

Having to change the video drivers to "compress the edges" seems like a messy task. I don't see any information about control software that lets you choose which edges are compressed, either.

A little sparse on technical detail, though that is somewhat expected... I want to know where the "compressed image" it talks about comes from. Does it create additional "virtual pixels" that cover the gap, and then mash them into the few on the edges?

Re:Interesting, but

[CausticWindow]

I read about this in another article (can't remember where though) that it compresses the edges (10-20 pixels) with a discrete cosine transformation (as in jpeg). They could use huffmann, but that would make the edges jagged, and the screen wouldn't be seamless anymore.

The reason that they have to do this in the driver is that they have to hit low level to get decent speeds (windows display drivers can hit the hardware directly, contrary to most other windows drivers).

Re:Oled's are they the saviour of lcd tech?

[stratjakt]

The fantasy is that OLED will be so cheap to produce, it wont matter to you. Your roll-up wall-sized screen will be priced like drapery fabric at the local craft store.

So when it fades, you'll be able to replace it cheaply, just like replacing the faded Pink Floyd poster from your college days.

This, of course, has been the promise of most new tech. Super-cheap and disposable. We'll see.

Reasonable, but not great, idea.

[Animats]

This is a plausible, although not great, idea. Optically expanding a display screen a bit to merge the edges have been tried before. It's possible to expand the whole image without parallax using a big fibre optic plate, but that approach is heavy and expensive. This approach apparently only messes with the edges, squeezing them digitally to compensate for an optical device (probably a plastic Fresnel lens) that expands them to cover the gap. The compressed region also needs an intensity boost, since fewer pixels are filling more area. From the pictures, they didn't do that, so there's a dim line at the joint.

We'll have to see how good it is, and whether it looks any good from an off-axis viewpoint.

"Doctor, I want a system where everything comes out of one hole." Mike Todd, producer, to the head of American Optical, discussing wide-screen projection.

Re:Rear Projection

[Dirk.Reiners]

There are a bunch of these around, the keyword to look for is tiled display. It's been an active topic in the computer graphics and virtual reality community for the last couple years, and people have been building different sizes and using different alignment methods. The biggest ones I know are the NCSA 40 node and our 48 node system. Most of them are mono, there are two stereo-capable systems, one in Boston, the other one is ours.

The problem with the "rough alignment, use computer vision to sort it out" approach is the overlap area. Current projectors have a pretty sucky contrast (black to white) ratio. In the overlap areas all the blacks are added together, so the actual black you get is already pretty bright and there's nothing you can do about it. That's why we decided to go the hard route and do exact alignment. It's hard, but it's doable, and the results are pretty cool.

The presented method avoids that problem by design, so that's what makes it interesting, IMHO. Beside the fact that it doesn't need a separate air condition and 3 m back-projection space...