A Distributed Graphics System for Large Tiled Displays

Recent interest in large displays has led to renewed development of tiled displays, which are comprised of several individual displays arranged in an array and used as one large logical display. Stanford 's "Interactive Mural" is an example of such a display, using an overlapping four by two array of projectors that back-project onto a diffuse screen to form a 6' by 2' display area with a resolution of over 60 dpi. Writing software to make effective use of the large display space is a challenge because normal window system interaction metaphors break down. One promising approach is to switch to immersive applications; another approach, the one we are investigating, is to emulate office, conference room or studio environments which use the space to display a collection of visual material to support group activities. In this paper we describe a virtual graphics system that is designed to support multiple simultaneous rendering streams from both local and remote sites. The system abstrac..