A Distributed Graphics System for Large Tiled Displays
Greg Humphreys and
Pat Hanrahan
Stanford University
Appears in the Proceedings of IEEE Visualization '99
Abstract:
Recent interest in large displays has led to renewed development of tiled
displays, which are comprised of several individual displays arranged in an
array and used as one large logical display. Stanford's ``Interactive Mural''
is an example of such a display, using an overlapping four by two array of
projectors that back-project onto a diffuse screen to form a 6' by 2' display
area with a resolution of over 60 dpi. Writing software to make effective use
of the large display space is a challenge because normal window system
interaction metaphors break down. One promising approach is to switch to
immersive applications; another approach, the one we are investigating, is to
emulate office, conference room or studio environments which use the space to
display a collection of visual material to support group activities.
In this paper we describe a virtual graphics system that is designed to support
multiple simultaneous rendering streams from both local and remote sites. The
system abstracts the physical number of computers, graphics subsystems and
projectors used to create the display. We provide performance measurements to
show that the system scales well and thus supports a variety of different
hardware configurations. The system is also interesting because it uses
transparent ``layers,'' instead of windows, to manage the screen.
Paper:
Paper in PDF (150K) and Compressed Postscript (200K)
Color plate in PDF (2MB) and Compressed Postscript (1.7MB)
Greg Humphreys