Innovations in Visualization

MAD Boxes

Ryan Schmidt
Sheelagh Carpendale

Plug and Play Wall Display

While interest in large displays is growing rapidly, they are still not common-place. Significant technical knowledge is required to construct and maintain current display wall systems. Our goal is to make large tiled-projector displays essentially ‘plug and play’. We want a design that can be incrementally expanded and reconfigured at will. We want a software environment that is identical to a standard desktop computer, with no need for rendering clusters and special libraries. We have designed a display wall solution that meets our needs. With our Modular Ambient Display (MAD) boxes, a variety of high-resolution large display configurations can be quickly assembled. By integrating interaction hardware into each box, we have created a stand-alone interactive large display component. Our system permits experimentation not only with the wall software, but the physical wall configuration as well.

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Publications

Eric Penner, Ryan Schmidt and Sheelagh Carpendale. A GPU Cluster Without the Clutter: A Drop-in Scalable Programmable-Pipeline with Several GPUs and Only One PC. In Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D 2006). ACM, 2006. PDF Paper
R. Schmidt, E. Penner and M. S. T. Carpendale. Reconfigurable Displays. In The ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Workshop: Ubiquitous Display Environments; UBICOMP 2004. ACM Press, 2004. PDF Paper