As most of you know, my research focuses on display wall user interfaces at the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at Virginia Tech. My main focus of late has been on multi-mon game interfaces and notification systems. I modified the open source
Stratagus engine which runs the Warcraft 2 clone--Wargus--to support a resolution of 3840x2160 pixels. I designed a variety of UI's to accomadate for such a large surface area--but I'll get into the details of that later. For now I'll explain the different system architectures we're working with at the lab. The system that Warcraft 2 is running on in the images below is just a 3.2GHZ 2GB RAM Windows XP machine with 5 dual-head graphics cards. The screen is made by
VisBox and consists of a matrix of HD rear projectors projecting onto a special acrylic glass. Each screen, called a VisBlock, can be arranged in various forms and allows for a virtually seamless, very high definition display. We currently have 18 arranged in a 6x3 matrix, but each half is run independently (but that will change soon). Even with only 9 monitors, you can see almost the entire map (the largest supported).
Full shot of Warcraft 2 running at 3840x2160.
Angled shot showing how the projectors display onto the glass.
Another angled shot taken a little closer.
A close up shot demonstrating the UI centered around the cursor.
Side shot showing off one row of projectors.
