| Summary: | In the past decade, there has been significant interest in display technologies suitable for ubiquitous and ambient computing applications. Computer-augmented LED devices termed smart pixels have been gaining popularity in this research area as well as for commercial displays or architectural lighting. Compared with conventional display devices, such as LCD screens, smart pixels are flexible and unobtrusive. They may be deployed in locations where conventional displays would be infeasible and in irregular geometric arrangements, including 3D. However, up until now, smart pixels have been high complexity or limited in scalability or usability. This thesis argues for suitable requirements for a smart pixel technology which is scalable, usable, and low-complexity. A general architecture fulfilling these requirements is proposed. This architecture includes a wired network hierarchy for distributing power and data to pixels using power-line communication techniques, a location algorithm using visible-light communications and multi-view reconstruction to create an accurate 3D model of pixel positions, and a display representation suitable for allowing 2D or 3D, bitmap or vector graphic content to be rendered to a smart pixel display. An industry sponsored implementation of the architecture, Firefly, is described and used to evaluate the suitability of the proposed architecture. The major contributions of the work are the architecture itself, two novel power-line communication protocols which allow for dynamic addressing of pixels and are intended for use with high-power digital applications, and a 3D location algorithm using LEDs and cameras. The thesis concludes with a detailed summary of these contributions and proposes future work.
|
|---|
