Lessons learned from building and calibrating the ICWall, a stereo tiled display

Abstract

AbstractImplementation of stereo tiled displays is a rather demanding task. In this article we want to share the lessons we have learned during the design and construction of the ICWall tiled display. This large display, used in a classroom setting, is a high‐resolution stereo tiled display (2 × 8 tiles), built from low‐cost commodity components. The overall image is produced by an array of projectors. When building such a system, a key challenge is to align the projector images. We describe our automated approach for alignment/calibration of the left‐ and right‐eye stereo images. We provide measurements that show accuracy of this procedure. We explain and compare two calibration approaches: a single‐pass and a two‐pass rendering method to align the tiled images. We explain how to provide seamless image on the tiled display and which issues have to be solved. We also discuss the depth perception issues on the ICWall for the large audiences. Another important aspect, is the architecture of the software used for PC‐cluster‐based rendering. We describe Aura, the parallel scene graph API that is used for rendering on our tiled display. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.