Towards Gigapixel Display for Data Visualization

The rapid development of digital camera technology has increased image resolution by an order of magnitude in the recent years with 20 megapixel SLR cameras now being widely available. Even gigapixel images are now made possible by special cameras or scanners or by stitching together hundreds of images taken with automatic mounts. However, display technology has not made similar progress. In television sets we are still waiting for the move from PAL (0.5 megapixels) to HDTV (2 megapixels) and computer monitors range from a typical 1 megapixels to 4 megapixels on the newer 30 inch wide screen LCDs. Projector technology is in the same range from 1.5 megapixels for the 1400 x 1050 customer beamers to the still unique 4K x 2K bulky LCOS cinema projectors. In order to display gigapixel imagery one can either pan and zoom such images on traditional displays or one can reverse the stitching idea and try to build tiled displays composed of several single display surfaces.