The ultimate display: where will all the pixels come from?
Benjamin A. Watson, David P. Luebke · Computer · 2005
Building a wall-sized display that supports human visual acuity during close-up viewing would require about 670 megapixels, with 190 dpi. 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. 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: printer-resolution (600 dpi) wall displays updated at 240 Hz, requiring 7.2 gigapixels. The real challenge of these displays is bandwidth, to which the authors offer one innovative solution: adaptive frameless rendering. This approach abandons the traditional concepts of animation as sequence of images, or frames, and departs from viewing images as temporally coherent grids of samples, or pixels. Instead, it generates samples selectively when and where they are needed. A prototype system indicates that our approach could reduce bandwidth requirements by one to two orders of magnitude.