Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...