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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.
...that was mentioned on Slashdot.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
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.
Big deal. I'm wating for the DirectBrainX from Microsoft. Just plug directly into the base of your skull and watch your will to live drain away.
Blue screens now resulting in total loss of bowel functions!
*sniff* I'm getting misty just thinking about it.
OLEDs are almost there, they are already being used in small portable devices (cameras and phones). They can be scaled without the fabrication issues that hit CRTs and LCDs. There is a good chance that OLED screens will be the first consumer-ready wall screen system (the current best of breed being the projector).
But this looks fun, and it may be a good stopgap. I'm wondering whether it can be used to build (for instance) large LCD monitors for PCs...? I once had a portable that used two B&W LCDs to achieve a larger display area, but I've never seen this done with color LCDs.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
www.draper.com Back when I installed Air Traffic Control simulators we used Draper screens. I was looking at the Draper site and they said they had seemless displays and this was about a year ago. We could get pretty seemless with the large screens that we had.
Here's a Press Release...
+5, Female
I saw a demonstration using a beowulf cluster (well, part of one) that was rendering a moving 3-d CAD model. They just threw the projectors so they were somewhat aligned, used a webcam and had one of the nodes look at the overlap and correct for the projector's misalignment in real time. ~20 other CPUs were doing the rendering, but it only took one to make the display come out right. I would imagine the same thing could be done for a rear-projection screen. As long as the projectors didn't get jostled after being observed by the computer it should work fine.
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.
Here is another atricle about it that includes a picture of the display. This one isn't Slashdotted.
One word: PORN!
I don't know about you, but I believe that some things are better not seen blown up 20X.
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...