Accenture - Interactive Walls
When groups of people work on complicated problems, they tend to generate large, shared displays spontaneously, whether in the form of printouts on a tabletop, posters, or marks on a whiteboard. This kind of shared view is a powerful aid to cooperative understanding, but it is most successful if it is robust, accessible, dynamic, editable. Computer displays, even large ones, have never adequately answered these needs.
Accenture have built a commercially available interactive wall using a very large, high-resolution display that is touch-sensitive. Its applications can handle interactions from multiple users, acting simultaneously.
The Accenture Technology Labs has created a scalable architecture which can support Walls of any size and resolution. “We use a series of commodity PCs and software parallelism rather than proprietary fusion hardware for higher performance at lower cost.” The natural parallelism of the system allows for full workstation performance across the entire Wall. Applications might feature complex CAD models, high-resolution video, interactive simulations, game graphics, or all of the above.
To draw the pixels, various display solutions are possible, from stackable cube style monitors to tiled-projection displays. To detect user touch, the Labs has developed its own camera-based touch system, which operates at a very large scale with a fine degree of resolution.
1 comment February 11th, 2006
