The Air Force Research Laboratory/Warfighter Training Research Division (AFRL/HEA) located in Mesa, Arizona, has been developing Ultra-High-Resolution (UHR) projector technology since the mid 1990's. A major lab goal is to provide Air Force fighter pilots with eye-limited resolution during their simulator training scenarios. Based upon display geometry of the Boeing Visual Integrated Display System (VIDS) and the Air Force's Mobile Modular Display for Advanced Research and Training (M2DART), a UHR projector capable of displaying an unprecedented resolution of 5,120 pixels by 4,096 lines at 60 Hz frame rate is required. The Air Force has several such UHR concepts in development. A UHR projector meeting these requirements would have a bandwidth of 1.3 giga pixels per second. This pixel bandwidth is an order of magnitude higher than what any single channel Image Generator (IG) currently produces. One way to achieve such bandwidths is to use multiple IG channels in parallel.
PC based IG capabilities have been increasing at a rapid rate and are relatively inexpensive compared to their mainframe IG predecessors. This makes PC-IGs the most likely selection to drive the UHR displays of the future. However, depending upon the application, PC-IGs can have some significant trade-off differences vs. the mainframe IGs. Historically, when a single PC-IG channel is used to drive large fields of view in fixed-wing aircraft training simulations, they demonstrate a lower database retrieval range than mainframe IGs, which can result in restrictions being placed on the pilot's visibility range. Current Digital Visual Interface (DVI) compliant graphics adapters used in PC-IGs only support up to HDTV video formats.
The authors posit that PC based IG performance limitations can be overcome with an innovative approach to combine digital video outputs from synchronized PC-IG arrays. Since each PC-IG of the array only processes a small segment of the UHR display's field of view, the supportable scene complexity could be dramatically increased at a performance level exceeding that of mainframe IGs. This paper explores the architectural design concepts and associated technologies of driving UHR visual displays by combining digital video outputs from synchronized PC-IG arrays.