Bright Lights, Big Picture.(Company Business and Marketing)

Unique lighting and optics help a new display technology shine

The future of the big screen never looked so bright. Visualization researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, in collaboration with the JVC Digital Image Technology Center, have developed a tiled display technology that promises to raise the power wall concept to new heights. Called the High-Density Display (HDD), the innovative system utilizes a novel tiling approach and custom optics to provide high-quality, high-density views of large, complex datasets.

Most of the tiled display systems available today rely on matrices of video projectors that are configured to produce a single large output image. The resulting display, while of sufficient resolution to accommodate large datasets, often lacks uniformity across the multiple tiles because of optical variations among the projector units. "The output of any one tile typically does not match the color and intensity of its neighboring tiles," according to John Moreland, the lead engineer on the HDD project. In addition, because most tiled displays occupy a significant amount of space, viewers who want or need to see the entire display must observe it from far away or move close and walk from side to side to pan over the image tiles.

In contrast, viewers using the HDD observe uniform imagery over every tile of the display, and they are able to see the entire HDD projection without having to change their physical viewing location and without losing any detail. The factors enabling this are the displays reliance on a shared light source and a fiber optics-based light distribution system, for which the SDSC and JVC currently hold a one-year provisional patent.

The HDD light source provides uniform intensity of light for all tiles, and because it is a single light, the uniformity is maintained even as the lamp ages. Similarly, shared color filters provide the same red, green, and blue color hue to each tile's optics module. The light and color is distributed evenly among the modules by a randomized fiber optic delivery system.

The HDD tiles themselves are capable of higher density, higher resolution projection thanks to a custom, tightly packed optics configuration. The special set-up enables each tile to produce a 21-inch diagonal display and a native 1280-by-1024 pixel image.

The SDSC Visualization Lab currently houses and is further developing an HDD system configured in a 3-by-1 tile arrangement. The researchers plan to expand this to ...