This project seeks to outfit offices, classrooms, and public spaces in the Computer Science Department at UNC with multi-projector displays that operate as a single wide-area logical computer display replacing the traditional CRT-based displays now found in these spaces. This infrastructure will enable fundamental basic research in computer graphics, networking, multimedia networking, collaborative systems, and human-computer interaction. The research will consist of an integrated computer systems research effort into the display environment of the future and a large-scale usage experiment to assess the impact of the environments we will construct.
As a computer systems research project we seek to explore new technologies and system architectures for supporting high-resolution distributed computer displays. This problem is fundamental to the future growth and development of the computer industry and the fields of computer science and engineering. Modern computer display architecture is a direct result of 1940's vintage television standards, which are outdated in today's digital world. The notion of a raster display that is periodically refreshed from a block of shared processor memory at a constant rate is a direct result of using Cathode Ray Tubes (CRTs) as early computer monitors. Moreover, this "raster-scan" approach assumes a dumb device with minimal state and a low-level interface. We believe providing local intelligence within displays will decouple the notion of a display device from the specific computer driving it.
We envision treating displays as shared resources that operate independently of the specific computing platforms that present data to them. Our approach provides seamless and symmetric access to the display from any host, and supports multiple simultaneous host connections to a single display. We propose to achieve this via the efficient transport of displayed information, and through the use of effective transport and network-level mechanisms for quality-of-service. Developing higher-level semantics for display interfaces will improve bandwidth utilization. The combination of higher-level interfaces and local intelligence will also improve interaction with the ability to adapt the presentation of a content stream to the specific display platform. In other words, an intelligent display will tailor its presentation according to whether the display is on a low-resolution mobile device or a wall-sized boardroom display. It will, likewise, adapt its display according to available communication bandwidth.
In this computer systems research we are proposing four new initiatives. We will investigate and develop new intelligent display architectures capable of overcoming the limitations of traditional frame-buffer architectures. We will develop higher-level and more bandwidth-efficient protocols for communicating data to visual displays. We will extend digital display interconnections so that they are more akin to real-time networks, thus increasing their utility and flexibility. Lastly, we will develop the synchronization and visual context-switching capabilities necessary to virtualize displays so that they can be used as distributed resources. Second, as a large-scale experiment into the use of wide-area displays in offices and classrooms we seek to study the effect of our proposed display architecture on personal work habits and productivity, teaching, student mentoring, and group and peer collaboration. We will undertake traditional user studies to assess the impact and efficacy of the environments we propose to construct.
Broader Impact. Ubiquitous displays, large and small, and decoupled from specific computers, will transform the way we live, work, and learn. In the workplace, these displays will enhance collaboration, and alleviate the need to synchronize and transfer files between computers. At home, intelligent displays will provide unprecedented access to information. For instance, displays, which normally show family photographs, could be queried for weather forecasts. At school large projection displays have the potential to revolutionize education and collaboration by enabling the presentation of true multimedia (multiple, independent media streams and windows) from arbitrary sources.
