The n-dimensional display interface
Charles D. Estes, Ketan D. Mayer-Patel · 2012
The framebuffer is a simple yet powerful abstraction for representing display data. It ably serves as a "narrow waist" for the display pipeline, allowing graphics software and display technology to evolve in parallel. Converging trends such as mobile computing, very large displays, and 3DTV are challenging the inherent inefficiency of practically serializing and encoding the framebuffer tens or hundreds of times per second. In this paper, we present a flexible new software abstraction that can deliver tremendous channel efficiency when application level semantics are exploited. The goal is to develop a versatile interface from this elastic narrow waist that scales from very large displays to small, low-power displays connected over wireless links.