A Highly Scalable Rendering Framework for Arbitrary Display and Display-in-Display Configurations

A Highly Scalable Rendering Framework for Arbitrary Display and Display-in-Display Configurations
Matthias Deller, Sebastian Thelen, Daniel Steffen, Peter-Scott Olech, Achim Ebert, Jan Malburg, Jörg Meyer
Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Computer Graphics & Virtual Reality International Conference on Computer Graphics & Virtual Reality (CGVR-2009), located at WorldComp'09, July 13-16, Las Vegas, NV, USA

Abstract:

Large displays are playing an increasingly important role in today' s visualization research. One of the most scalable and cost-effective ways to build a large display with appropriately high resolution is by the use of tiled displays. Unfortunately, it is still a rather high overhead to build even simple OpenGL applications that can effectively scale with the size, number and stereoscopic capabilities of the used display devices. In this paper, we present a lightweight rendering framework that gives users a quick and flexible way to implement OpenGL-based applications that scale to an arbitrary number of tiled display devices and several stereo formats. In addition to customary tiled display setups, our framework supports a variety of stereoscopic modes, both for single and tiled diplays, as well as overlapping and display-in-display configurations. To demonstrate this point, we will also present two non-conventional display setups realized with the AnyScreen framework.