Bernard Pailthorpe

Ultra-resolution display systems for computational science and engineering

Many R&D sectors have a growing need to display more pixels in digital displays, as data, image size and supercomputer output continue to increase. This demand has been met, within the High Performance Computing (HPC) community, by tiling multiple projected images into a composite image of larger pixel capacity and display area. However problems of color and illumination non-uniformities between projectors reduce the perceptual quality of the composite image and may limit its utility in other applications. In this paper we review such displays in the context of their motivating applications from Computational Science and Engineering (CS&E). That community is using 25-30 Mega-pixel displays and is close to implementing 50-100 Mega-pixel systems, albeit with reduced image quality. We present further results characterizing our compact, tiled projector array. The system uses a common light source with a single set of dichroic filters to reduce image non-uniformities. Photometric variations between projectors are lowered by individually tuning contrast, brightness or gamma curves of the D-ILA chips, allowing near seamless tiling of the projected images. We report photometric measurements characterizing the display and its optical losses. The total image capacity for a 3 x 1 array is 3840 by 1024 pixels at a resolution of 80 dpi. Increases, beyond 50-100 Mega-pixels are possible with next-generation D-ILA chips in production at QXGA (2k x 1.5k) native resolution and laboratory demonstration of QHDTV (3.8k x 2k). Advances in newer technologies may permit the manufacture of high pixel density and high capacity displays.