Massive No-touch Physically-interfaced Display

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bHWuvzBtJo]

[Daniel] wrote in to show us the project his group has been working on. It is a massive display wall consisting of 28 projectors and 30 computers.  With a resolution of 7168×3072, viewing a 13.3 gigapixel image is a treat. That treat is made even stronger by the fact that navigating the image is done multitouch style with a touchless system built from web cams.  We’ve seen lots of projects come out of the NUI group with similar interfaces, but none that used the webcams like this. Usually, the webcam is detecting some kind of interaction between the person and an infra red light source. Maybe that is happening here and we just don’t see it.

23 thoughts on “Massive No-touch Physically-interfaced Display

  1. I wonder if you could use a webcam set back at the projectors to color correct them so that you had a “seamless” image. A rear projection setup would be nice too.

  2. why projectors? their resolution is horrible compared to an actual screen.. not to mention the box shape that is being caused is far from a seamless display, offset in some of the demonstrations. While it is great in being closer to a minority report interactive reality- there seems to be a skip in quality, while at the same time being claimed.

  3. Gec,

    The IMAGE is 13.3 GigaPixel. If you watch the video they explain that the picture was stitched together from 2200 individual pictures in order to create this huge pic.

    Creative method of using the projectors similar to a rear projection TV instead of front. No shadows!

  4. Man, I just built a 5760×1080 setup. I’m not supposed to be jealous! :(

    This kind of reminds me of this idea (of which I need to start a project on) that could use two webcams to approximate the line between the user’s sight and finger such that the data could be converted into cursor position. Never thought of using size, though, this is pretty interesting.

  5. @Polymath: I like the idea. It’s possible that they could, also, use the images to create individual filters for each projector to eliminate hot spots.

    @awesomepossum: They, probably, used projectors because they don’t have a bezel. Even if you tale an LCD/OLED/Plasma screen out of it’s case, there is always a rim of PCB and electronics around the active region of a screen making it impossible to get a continuous image.

    @BuddhaFW: Yea, but at that resolution they’d be soldering the LEDs until the sun died.

  6. No it’s 13.3 gigapixel… I have no idea why retarded europeans cant figure how how to use a decimal. even your scientists think it’s raging dumb to use a comma instead of a decimal.

    The wierd part is that it’s only a very recent (in history time) change that created the nasty bug that is transposing comma and period in numbers.

    Just because all of you got wacky back in 1958 does not mean you need to do something that only causes confusion.

    123,456,789.00 <- scientists all over this planet do it that way when using Arabic numerals. If you dont like it, then switch to roman.

  7. I’ve done some work with these guys — there are some videos of our complex systems simulations running on the Display Wall on YouTube:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-JnnAQZn68
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkwpJ8_xmVc
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjAZC_v4oOE

    It is a back-projection setup, and they do automatic correction using a webcam (you should see what it looks like before correction — and it’s actually not as bad in real life as it looks on video). The limiting factor is the different aging rates of the projector lamps; replacing them regularly is too expensive, so the best they can do is swap the lamps around so the nice bright ones are in the middle of the display.

    It’s the interaction stuff that’s really cool, particularly the gesture tracking using a row of cheap webcams on the floor and a string of Christmas lights on the ceiling!

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