What gigapixels will mean for the future of interactive displays

Imagine a state-of-the-art hospital where the floors transform into a digital canvas that guides visitors to their destinations.  Or an amusement park with hundreds of meters of interactive displays that are capable of locating a lost child. These are the kind of leaps forward projected in display technology, but we won’t see it hit the mainstream until developers start leveraging the power of gigapixels, says Bob Rushby, Innovator in Residence at University of Waterloo’s REAP program and President of Pixelized Light Inc.

The majority of digital displays have screen resolutions that are measured in megapixels, or one million pixels. Apple’s iPad with retina display, for example, has a resolution of approximately three million pixels.  The displays Rushby and other envision have more than one billion pixels, and come in all sizes, shapes and forms. They are not the static, rectangular displays found in every home and commercial space.

“When I was with Christie, I was in Japan with my colleagues discussing displays, asking why are they always rectangular, why are we limited by the number of pixels, why can’t they be any size,” says the retired chief technology officer of Christie Digital Systems, and co-inventor of Christie Microtiles. “People are creatures of habit. We are used to rectangles…and it’s going to take a number of people in different fields starting to say there are better ways to do that.”

Rushby suggests the displays of the future will be regarded more as building materials, and that architects will embed displays in the design of both commercial and residential spaces. But before this technology becomes mainstream in public places, there are significant challenges to address, and the most significant, perhaps, is a lack of software developers working on applications.

“Researchers haven’t thought through this idea of massive pixel displays that are both useful and interesting,” Rushby says. “What does this do for public policy? It means that roads and other public spaces become (canvasses on which to display information).”

Stony Brook University in New York has created the world’s first gigapixel resolution display, the Reality Deck, which features an interactive 1.5 billion pixels. The Reality Deck can be used to explore architectural models while allowing for the accurate rendering of event the smallest details. The large workspace of the Reality Deck allows large groups of users to easily collaborate on building designs.

Montreal’s Arsenal Media is an award-winning digital content marketer that is blazing the trail in the digital canvas arena, according to Rushby, and for clients in diverse industries. Arsenal helped The Nielsen Company transform its corporate lobby with a multi-zone digital space that features MicroTiles, a plasma screen and an LCD. At Christie Digital Systems, Arsenal installed a video wall that runs product and branded digital content at a full native resolution of 23,760 x 2700 pixels – the equivalent of 30 full HD sources or eight 4K resolutions.

The cost of building more interactive displays has also dropped dramatically in the past five years, and that will also make the technology more accessible, Rushby says. Today, a large-scale display of one billion pixels can be built for about $80,000.

“Not so long ago, an 80-inch LCD display would be $70,000; now it’s $3,000 and that’s only a few years.”