SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop an architecture to support the management and display of media on a new class of emerging displays. The proposed architecture is a new approach to supporting displays with the ability to 1) reconfigure themselves as different display components (projectors) are repositioned and 2) scale to potentially hundreds of millions of pixels. This will be accomplished using a unique distributed framebuffer abstraction that allows pixels to be managed over large clusters of machines and a subscription model that supports reconfiguration. The proposed Media Fusion Architecture has the potential to significantly impact the way in which the world interacts with media. The proposed approach will also have impact on several scientific communities including distributed rendering, media distribution, and memory management. The techniques that will be introduced are complementary of approaches by those communities but are unique in that they address the challenges of a cluster of display devices. Beyond the tremendous potential for economic and scientific impact, the Media Fusion Architecture will introduce advanced display technologies to users who have never had access to them before. Examples include, display walls in the classroom, conference rooms, teleconferencing, and even the home

This SBIR Phase II project will develop and deliver a software media architecture that removes a critical barrier to the widespread use of multi-projector, high-resolution, ultra definition displays. The approach defines a set of layered abstractions from the low-level display driver to higher-level protocols including multi-user display use and security. This model is the bedrock of a new display architecture that will not constrain future display innovations, allow content developers and producers to communicate to current and future display systems, and acts to isolate the underlying complexities of new display technologies from users. Building on this new architecture, the Phase II project will implement a software-based Display Operating System. The project is motivated by the perception that we will soon live in a world where displays cease to be individual discreet devices but rather become an extension of our environment; a limitless fabric of pixels. The potential impact of this innovation is significant, by removing the usability and cost barriers normally associated with ultrahigh-resolution displays, applications once available to only a select few can become commonplace. This has the potential to change the advanced visualization, media interaction models, as well as the way in which we interact with our computational environments