Display Wall Research Articles

Experiment on Tele-immersive Communication with Tiled Display Wall over Wide Area Network

In order to support advanced remote collaborative works via WAN, sharing various visual contents between remote sites and displaying the existence of remote participants by transmission of high-quality video streaming in real scene is important. However, the display specification of large-scale screen system such as commercial projector and wide-area monitor to display these visual contents is low-resolution, and displaying of real video streaming with sufficient quality is difficult. In this paper, we have constructed tele-immersive environment with tiled display wall to realize displaying real video streaming and visual contents by high-resolution. In addition, we have tried the construction of the environment to display more high-quality video streaming on tiled display wall by transmitting multi-video streaming which captured by two cameras in remote site. By using the environment, we have conducted some experiments on tele-immersive communication on JGN2plus network which is a nationwide scale WAN. From experimental results, we have showed that these video streaming have been displayed wide area of remote site more high-quality than magnified view of video by a single small camera. Moreover, we have tried realistic display processing of ultra resolution astronomical observation image and movie data to display in full view visualization contents with ultra resolution which is difficult to display on a usual PC. As these results, we have enabled to observe the entire image of observation data all over tiled display wall.

Perception of Visual Variables on Tiled Wall-Sized Displays for Information Visualization Applications.

We present the results of two user studies on the perception of visual variables on tiled high-resolution wall-sized displays. We contribute an understanding of, and indicators predicting how, large variations in viewing distances and viewing angles affect the accurate perception of angles, areas, and lengths. Our work, thus, helps visualization researchers with design considerations on how to create effective visualizations for these spaces. The first study showed that perception accuracy was impacted most when viewers were close to the wall but differently for each variable (Angle, Area, Length). Our second study examined the effect of perception when participants could move freely compared to when they had a static viewpoint. We found that a far but static viewpoint was as accurate but less time consuming than one that included free motion. Based on our findings, we recommend encouraging viewers to stand further back from the display when conducting perception estimation tasks. If tasks need to be conducted close to the wall display, important information should be placed directly in front of the viewer or above, and viewers should be provided with an estimation of the distortion effects predicted by our work-or encouraged to physically navigate the wall in specific ways to reduce judgement error.

Scaling up multi-touch selection and querying: Interfaces and applications for combining mobile multi-touch input with large-scale visualization displays

We present a mobile multi-touch interface for selecting, querying, and visually exploring data visualized on large, high-resolution displays. Although emerging large (e.g., ∼10m wide), high-resolution displays provide great potential for visualizing dense, complex datasets, their utility is often limited by a fundamental interaction problem – the need to interact with data from multiple positions around a large room. Our solution is a selection and querying interface that combines a hand-held multi-touch device with 6 degree-of-freedom tracking in the physical space that surrounds the large display. The interface leverages context from both the user's physical position in the room and the current data being visualized in order to interpret multi-touch gestures. It also utilizes progressive refinement, favoring several quick approximate gestures as opposed to a single complex input in order to most effectively map the small mobile multi-touch input space to the large display wall. The approach is evaluated through two interdisciplinary visualization applications: a multi-variate data visualization for social scientists, and a visual database querying tool for biochemistry. The interface was effective in both scenarios, leading to new domain-specific insights and suggesting valuable guidance for future developers.

High-performance visual analytics of terrestrial light detection and ranging data on large display wall

A typical LIDAR (light detection and ranging) scan contains hundreds of millions of points. As such, the visualization of LIDAR point clouds poses a significant challenge in data analysis. We propose to visualize and process LIDAR point clouds on a large display wall with an array of monitors. This provides researchers with a high-resolution display environment for looking at and studying large data sets. High-resolution large displays offer both global perspectives and local details of point clouds, which is essential in the process of data exploration. The ability to explore, conceptualize, and correlate spatial and temporal changes of topographical records is required for the development of new analytical models that capture the mechanisms contributing toward cliff erosion. Large displays driven by high-performance parallel visualization cluster allow researchers to fully interact with LIDAR point clouds of slopes in Houshanyue mountain and cliff failures observed in Solana Beach in California. In our study, cases studies of visualization based approaches were conducted using large displays in digital immersive environments. Visual analytics techniques such as delineation, segmentation, and classification of features, change detection, and annotation were used to perform erosion assessment. The results showed that the researchers can observe the temporal change of a failure mass effectively in high-resolution large display environments.

Short Communication: Receiver Systems for Object Mounts: a Design Concept for Safe Installation and Display Flexibility

The installation of an object in a museum exhibition may require the use of a custom mount to properly support the object and to securely attach it to the display substrate. The connection of the object to the substrate often can be done simply and directly using a post or structure that is integral to the mount. However, in situations where the object must be held for seismic stabilization or when other needs must be addressed, the use of a two-component mount/post design can allow the safe installation of the mount onto the object and the post to the display wall or deck. The mounted object is then joined to the post to complete the installation in a predictable fashion. This two-component system was termed a receiver by the Mountmaking Department at the Seattle Art Museum and has proven to be a valuable concept for the safe installation of museum objects. This article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the receiver system in various applications.

An Experiment on Multi-Video Transmission with Multipoint Tiled Display Wall

An Experiment on Multi-Video Transmission with Multipoint Tiled Display Wall

A Multi-Application Controller for SAGE-enabled Tiled Display Wall in Wide-area Distributed Computing Environments

Due to the recent advancement of networking and high-performance computing technologies, scientists can easily access large-scale data captured by scientific measurement devices through a network, and use huge computational power harnessed on the Internet for their analyses of scientific data. However, visualization technology, which plays a role of great importance for scientists to intuitively understand the analysis results of such scientific data, is not fully utilized so that it can seamlessly benefit from recent high-performance and networking technologies. One of such visualization technologies is SAGE (Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment), which allows people to build an arbitrarily sized tiled display wall and is expected to be applied to scientific research. In this paper, we present a multi-application controller for SAGE, which we have developed, in the hope that it will help scientists efficiently perform scientific research requiring high-performance computing and visualization. The evaluation in this paper indicates that the efficiency of completing a comparison task among multiple data is increased by our system.

Toward a Platform for Pervasive Display Applications in Retail Environments

The article discusses two prototypes - an interactive display wall and a targeted advertisement scenario - demonstrates the use of a context-aware middleware and provide insights into important requirements for display platforms for retail environments.

Development of a Interactive Stereoscopic Image Display System using Invisible Interaction Surface Generation

In this paper, we propose a development methodology of interactive stereoscopic image display system. In our case, we consider a multiple touch recognition technique as the interaction method. That's because we want to guarantee multiple user access and interaction to the content without any restriction. In this case, however, some restrictions are occurred on account of the distance between display and participants. For this reason, this paper propose an invisible interaction surfaces which are generated in the air. This surface is utilized as interaction medium instead of the display wall. We also present an effective way to generate and edit interactive stereoscopic images based on Game Engine.

Visualization of high-resolution image collections on large tiled display walls

This paper introduces an approach to interactively visualize a large collection of high-resolution images in large-scale tiled display environments. Our approach fully utilizes the distributed computing and rendering capabilities of visualization clusters that are driving tiled display walls. A seamless and unified workspace spanning across the entire wall is provided, while view dependent resource management strategies support smooth and fully interactive data analysis of a collection of images. Interactive image filtering and graphing techniques are presented, allowing features in individual images and patterns in image sets to be visualized on the fly. The provided case studies show that the presented approach can scale well beyond terapixel-scale visualization while providing highly responsive interactive environments.

CSTP: A parallel data transfer protocol using cross-stream coding

Transferring very high quality digital objects over optical networks is critical in many scientific applications, such as video streaming/conferencing, remote rendering on tiled display walls, or 3D virtual reality. Current data transfer protocols rely on UDP as well as a variety of compression techniques. None of the existing transfer protocols, however, scale well to many parallel data connections. Existing parallel streaming protocols have limited synchronization mechanisms for multiple streams, and they are prone to be slowed down significantly if one stream experiences significant packet loss. In this paper, we propose a new parallel streaming protocol which can stream many parallel data streams over optical networks: CSTP, the Cross-Stream Transfer Protocol. It not only tolerates random UDP packet loss, but also aims to tolerate unevenly distributed packet loss patterns across multiple streams to achieve synchronized parallel streams with limited coding overhead. We simulated the approach, and the results show that CSTP can generate steady throughput with fluctuating data streams of different data loss patterns, and can transfer data in parallel at a higher speed than multiple independent UDP streams.

A Scalable Distributed Paradigm for Multi-User Interaction with Tiled Rear Projection Display Walls

We present the first distributed paradigm for multiple users to interact simultaneously with large tiled rear projection display walls. Unlike earlier works, our paradigm allows easy scalability across different applications, interaction modalities, displays and users. The novelty of the design lies in its distributed nature allowing well-compartmented, application independent, and application specific modules. This enables adapting to different 2D applications and interaction modalities easily by changing a few application specific modules. We demonstrate four challenging 2D applications on a nine projector display to demonstrate the application scalability of our method: map visualization, virtual graffiti, virtual bulletin board and an emergency management system. We demonstrate the scalability of our method to multiple interaction modalities by showing both gesture-based and laser-based user interfaces. Finally, we improve earlier distributed methods to register multiple projectors. Previous works need multiple patterns to identify the neighbors, the configuration of the display and the registration across multiple projectors in logarithmic time with respect to the number of projectors in the display. We propose a new approach that achieves this using a single pattern based on specially augmented QR codes in constant time. Further, previous distributed registration algorithms are prone to large misregistrations. We propose a novel radially cascading geometric registration technique that yields significantly better accuracy. Thus, our improvements allow a significantly more efficient and accurate technique for distributed self-registration of multi-projector display walls.

Ubiquitous interactive visualization of large‐scale simulations in geosciences over a Java‐based web‐portal

AbstractWe have designed a web‐based software system for real‐time interactive visualization of results taken from large‐scale simulations of 3‐D mantle convection and other large‐scale modeling efforts. This approach allows for intense visualization sessions for a couple of hours as opposed to storing massive amounts of data in a storage system. Our data sets consist of 3‐D data with over 10 million unknowns at each time‐step to be used for volume rendering. Large‐scale interactive visualization on a display wall holding 15 million pixels has already been accomplished. With the advent of the age of the mobile web, we have now extended this tactic to hand‐held devices, such as the OQO, Nokia N800, netbooks, iPHONE, and Android OS phones. We are developing web‐based software in Java to extend the ubiquitous use of this system across long distances. The software is aimed at creating an interactive and functional application capable of running on multiple browsers by taking advantage of two AJAX‐enabled web frameworks: Echo2 (http://echo.nextapp.com/site/echo2) and Google Web Toolkit (http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/). Modular building of the system allows for components to be swapped out so that other forms of visualization can be accommodated, such as molecular dynamics in mineral physics or 2‐D data sets from the regional convection models. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

P‐45: Multi‐gray‐level Reflective LCD Module Design and Its Tiled Application

AbstractTo meet the requirement of large‐Sized indoor/outdoor billboard application, novel reflective LCD module has been designed and fabricated. The 300mm × 300mm sized reflective LCD panel, which has the resolution of 96×96 and single driver board in behind, can be applied in the seamless tiled display wall. 8‐gray‐level display had been achieved with the regulating on the driver pulse number.

Visualization of virtual screening results on tiled display walls (TDW)

Virtual screening has facilitated the drug discovery process through the use of molecular simulations to computationally identify inhibitors and has yielded a tremendous amount of data. These results cannot be utilized in laboratory experiments until they are analyzed manually to identify anomalies, redundant chemical structures, and false positives. For this reason, a new, high‐throughput method to analyze the results of virtual screenings is needed, thereby accelerating the drug discovery process.We have developed, deployed, and tested a modified version of ViewDock (named ViewDock TDW) on two separate TDW configurations. This tool allows a user to simultaneously visualize, group, compare, and analyze dozens of ligand‐receptor interactions on a TDW. To achieve this it was necessary to modify its communication with the molecular visualization program Chimera and create several other shell, python and perl scripts to enable the graphic user interface. ViewDock TDW preserves the functionality of the Chimera software, allowing for rotation, zoom, view angle, protein surface visualization, and calculation of hydrogen bonds. The program also enables global control over all ligand‐receptor models as well as specific control for commands to be sent to individuals or groups of ligand‐receptor pairs on the TDW. This program will help greatly in the visualization and analysis of virtual screening data.

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

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.

Using high-resolution displays for high-resolution cardiac data

The ability to perform fast, accurate, high-resolution visualization is fundamental to improving our understanding of anatomical data. As the volumes of data increase from improvements in scanning technology, the methods applied to visualization must evolve. In this paper, we address the interactive display of data from high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging scanning of a rabbit heart and subsequent histological imaging. We describe a visualization environment involving a tiled liquid crystal display panel display wall and associated software, which provides an interactive and intuitive user interface. The oView software is an OpenGL application that is written for the VR Juggler environment. This environment abstracts displays and devices away from the application itself, aiding portability between different systems, from desktop PCs to multi-tiled display walls. Portability between display walls has been demonstrated through its use on walls at the universities of both Leeds and Oxford. We discuss important factors to be considered for interactive two-dimensional display of large three-dimensional datasets, including the use of intuitive input devices and level of detail aspects.

Introduction

Introduction

Digital innovation for promoting knowledge of paddy functions

The purpose of this paper is to launch a new platform for advocating three functions of paddies including economics, society and environment through the cross-field integration of the agricultural hydrology, information technology and children’s picture book, which is novel. We translate literatures of paddy agriculture to popular content. Scientific visualization is applied to develop digital value-added content for enhancing effects according to computer graphics technologies. For developing the Internet channel, we take web-based architecture coupled with Java3D and Flash visualization as the main solution for engaging attention of virtual communities. With a web browser, we present paddy knowledge that is based on the above-mentioned popular content related to three functions of rice paddies. Furthermore, for the general public, the tiled display wall is employed to build up a fixed-site channel. In this paper, the demonstration of promoting interest in paddy fields has been established. Through exploring this digital paddy, not only children could be encouraged to learn, but also the public could accumulate the knowledge related to paddy agriculture.

Special section: OptIPlanet — The OptIPuter global collaboratory

The popularity of large-scale, high-resolution display walls, as visualization endpoints in eScience infrastructure, is rapidly growing. These displays can be connected to distributed computing resources over high-speed network, providing effective means for researchers to visualize, interact with, and understand large volumes of datasets. Typically large display walls are built by tiling multiple physical displays together and running a tiled display wall required a cluster of computers. With the advent of advanced graphics hardware, a single computer can now drive over a dozen displays, thereby greatly reducing the cost of ownership and maintenance of a tiled display wall system. This in turn enables a broader user base to take advantage of such technologies. Since tiled display walls are also well suited to collaborative work, users tend to launch and operate multiple applications simultaneously. To ensure that applications maintain a high degree of responsiveness to the users even under heavy use loads, the display wall must now ensure that the limited system resources are prioritized to maximize interactivity rather than thread-level fair sharing or overall job-completion throughput. In this paper, we present a new resource scheduling scheme that is specifically designed to prioritize responsiveness in collaborative large display wall environments where multiple users can interact with multiple applications simultaneously. We evaluate our scheduling scheme with a user study involving groups of users interacting simultaneously on a tiled display wall with multiple applications. Results show that our scheduling framework provided a higher frame-rate for applications, which led to a significantly higher user performance (approx. 25%) in a target acquisition test when compared against traditional operating system scheduling scheme.