Tools and applications for large-scale display walls

Abstract

The Princeton scalable display wall probject was started in 1998 with the goal of building a large-format, high-resolution display system with inexpensive commodity components. The project's first-generation display wall, built in March 1998, used an 18x8 foot rear projection screen and eight Proxima LCD commodity projectors. The system had a resolution of 4,096x1,536 pixels and was driven by a network of eight Pentium II PCs running Windows NT. In November 2000, the display was scaled up with 24 Compaq MP1800 digital light-processing (DLP) projectors and a network of 24 Pentium III PCs running Windows 2000. In the scaling efforts, the project team found that some previous techniques that were sufficient for eight projectors were excessively time consuming for 24 projectors and that some tools could no longer handle the system resolution. As a result of these findings, later research efforts were focused on making display walls more scalable, usable, and useful for collaborative research.