Advances towards high-resolution pack-and-go displays: A survey

Tiled displays provide high resolution and large scale simultaneously. Projectors can project on any available surface. Thus, it is possible to create a large high-resolution display by simply tiling multiple projectors on any available regular surface. The tremendous advancement in projection technology has made projectors portable and affordable. One can envision displays made of multiple such projectors that can be packed in one's car trunk, carried from one location to another, deployed at each location easily to create a seamless high-resolution display, and, finally, dismantled in minutes to be taken to the next location-essentially a pack-and-go display. Several challenges must be overcome in order to realize such pack-and-go displays. These include allowing for imperfect uncalibrated devices, uneven non-diffused display surfaces, and a layman user via complete automation in deployment that requires no user invention. We described the advances we have made in addressing these challenges for the most common case of planar display surfaces. First, we present a technique to allow imperfect projectors. Next, we present a technique to allow a photometrically uncalibrated camera. Finally, we present a novel distributed architecture that renders critical display capabilities such as self-calibration, scalability, and reconfigurability without any user intervention. These advances are important milestones towards the development of easy-to-use multi-projector displays that can be deployed anywhere and by anyone.