With the explosion of data in the past decade, it has been inevitable to use a high resolution display for many different applications. The common way to build a large area display is to tile more than one display units (LCD panels or projectors) to create one large display. One decision that almost everyone faces when building a large display is what kind of display units should be used.
Projectors are the only option if one wants to build a huge seamless display that looks like one single diaplsy. However, projectors show color and geometry mismatches which needs to be aligned manually during set-up. Also, as projectors can easily move around, they need periodic recalibration for aligning the geometry and matching the color across the units. Such manual set-up and recalibration is infeasible when dealing with more than four projectors. So, several camera-based automated calibration techniques have been proposed in the last decade which relieves the user of the burdens of a long-drawn manual process. But, the calibration and recalibration still needs an educated user and often proves to be a recurrent hassle.
LCD panels offer an easy solution to this problem. The color variation across multiple units are low and they can be put up as one engineering feat and does not need any recalibration. Thus, most of the time people just choose LCD panels to build their large area displays. However, the bezels around each panel result in a display that can never be seamless. These seams create a 'french door effect'. People slowly learn to live with these seams but they probably never stop wondering what kind of effects can these seams have.
The following power point presentation takes you through a number of tasks in large visualizations and shows you how bezels can cause a serious hindrance in performing some tasks. Maybe some of you have already faced such obstackes while using these for large scale visualization. Just click on the link and take the test yourself to see the effects. In this presentation we only present images. In the real-life situation of using such a tiled LCD panel display for interactive visualizations there are usually additional popping artifacts due to pan and zoom. Bezels will probably be more detrimental in such scenarios.
Note that the goal of this demonstration is not to prove that projection based displays are superior than LCD panel based display. Of course, there are situations when one will happily live with the seams. But this presentation shows that there are situations, especially for high-end scientific visualization, where a seamless projection based display becomes critical. Thus, one should be aware of the task in hand, the nature of the data to be visualized before really deciding on what solution to choose.
PLEASE TAKE THE TEST THROUGH THIS POWER POINT PRESENTATION