Tiled++: An Enhanced Tiled Hi-Res Display Wall

Abstract

In recent years, high-resolution displays have become increasingly important to decision makers and scientists because large screens combined with a high pixel count facilitate content rich, simultaneous display of computer-generated imagery and high-definition video data from multiple sources. Tiled displays are attractive due to their extended screen real estate, scalability, and low cost. LCD panels are usually preferred over projectors because of their superior resolution. One of the drawbacks of LCD-based tiled displays is the fact that users sometimes get distracted by the screens' bezels, which cause discontinuities in rendered images, animations, or videos. Most conventional solutions either ignore the bezels and display all pixels, causing objects to become distorted, or eliminate the pixels that would normally fall under the bezels, causing pixels to be missing in the display of static images. In animations, the missing pixels will eventually reappear when the object moves, providing an experience that is similar to looking through a French window. In this paper, we present a new scalable approach that leads neither to discontinuities nor to significant loss of information. By projecting onto the bezels, we demonstrate that a combination of LCD-based tiled displays and projection significantly reduces the bezel problem. Our technique eliminates ambiguities that commonly occur on tiled displays in the fields of information visualization, visual data analysis, human-computer interaction, and scientific data display. It improves the usability of multimonitor systems by virtually eliminating the bezels. We describe a setup and provide results from an evaluation experiment conducted on a 3 x 3 and on a 10 x 5 tiled display wall.

Giga-Scale Multiresolution Volume Rendering on Distributed Display Clusters

“…We found that the benefit of perceiving finer details of the data set outweighs these slight optical confusions. A user study we conducted [12] showed that sharp transitions between different levels of resolution on a tiled wall do not cause as much confusion as mismatches in brightness and color between screens. The problem of discontinuities caused by monitor bezels requires deeper investigation in the context of human-computer interaction.…”

“…The problem of discontinuities caused by monitor bezels requires deeper investigation in the context of human-computer interaction. Software [25] as well as hardware dependent solutions [12] have already been proposed.…”

Looking behind bezels

“…Rear-projection systems are still being developed, and have advantages such as being compatible with direct touch manipulation across tiles (an interaction typically hindered by bezels). But the higher pixel density, currently around 100dpi, the easier setup, and higher display quality of LCD panels, has made them a popular approach, enabling display capacities up to about 200 megapixels [1,4,9,24,25,26,28]. Such display capacity enables the visualization of large images, but also the juxtaposition of multiple datasets in coordinated views for compare and contrast tasks [29].…”

“…Tiled++ [9] projects a low-resolution version of the hidden regions on the bezels themselves. However, this only provides users with some sort of coarse preview of hidden information.…”

“…However, bezels are a problem when displaying large images such as maps or other visualizations that span multiple monitors. They create a visual discontinuity, that can basically be treated in one of two ways [9]. The problem can be ignored entirely, displaying the picture as if monitors were juxtaposed seamlessly: this solution, called the offset approach (Figure 2-a and Figure 3), is simple and straightforward; it has been employed by many early platforms.…”