54 Computer The Ultimate Display: Where Will All the

Could the answer be to compute fewer pixels? Renderers that break traditional framed patterns and opt for temporally adaptive sampling might be the key to printer-resolution wall displays that update hundreds of times per second. Imagine that the walls of your home and office are displays that show details sharper than your eye can possibly see and that they are updating those details so quickly that you don’t notice any flicker or delay. Text displayed on these walls is as crisp as it is on the printed page. During a videoconference, you can see every flicker of emotion on a colleague’s face. You can see the grass thrown up by a running back’s feet or wisps of hair around your favorite actor’s face. In computer games, you can see the grit on your opponent’s racing car and enjoy an instant response to your every twitch of the steering wheel. Building such a display would be extremely difficult. A wall-sized display that supports human visual acuity during close-up viewing would require about 670 megapixels, with 190 dpi. Why then do printers use resolutions that are so much higher? As the sidebar “How Much Detail Can We See?” describes, one reason is the eye’s hyperacuities, and a wall display that supports these would require roughly 165 gigapixels at 3,000 dpi. This is more than 10,000 times the pixels available in today’s largest displays. Human temporal sensitivities to delay only increase requirements for the ultimate display: In addition to having extremely high spatial resolution, the display must also be refreshed about four times more quickly than current displays. Obviously, we won’t see such displays for a long time. In the meantime, we can pursue a more realistic and still extremely useful challenge: printerresolution (600 dpi) wall displays updated at 24