Design and Assessment of a Scalable and Customizable Low-Cost Tiled Display System

Abstract

In this paper, a scalable hardware and software architecture for low-cost tiled display systems (a.k.a. videowalls), customizable through a dynamic web-based management and configuration service is presented and evaluated both objectively and subjectively. It has been designed for both stored and live broadcast/broadband content, in mosaic or warp distributions. The videowalls can be dynamically configured via web in different ways: the displays can create a single screen of a larger size, or they can be configured in a customized way in order to playout different media contents in different display combinations. As display renderers, low-cost devices are proposed as the main hardware element to obtain affordable systems. As a proof of concept, two prototypes have been implemented, including an accurate synchronization mechanism. Both objective and subjective evaluations have been conducted regarding synchronization accuracy and usability of the configuration service, obtaining satisfactory results.