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Opinion
Presentation & Display: The Challenge of Next-Generation
10/9/2006
By Will Craig
For her presentation at a private liberal arts college, a presenter confidently pulled out her laptop and set it on the table. Grabbing the handy VGA cable on the podium, she pulled it across to the table and pushed it against the back of her computer, but it didn’t feel quite right. Examining the back of her laptop, she discovered that her new laptop did not have a familiar VGA output after all; it had a DVI connector. Tech folks and staffers ran here and there, trying to find an adaptor. In the end, the presentation began 15 minutes late.
At a city council meeting, a civil engineer plugged his laptop into the city council chamber’s presentation system. His computer image appeared on all of the council and audience monitors, but not on the 17-inch annotation monitor built into the podium. Alas, the monitor could not handle the wide-aspect image from his laptop.
An architect designed a videoconferencing room with the instructor standing at a podium in the center of the room, directly in front of two rear projection screens. Now, the instructor is blinded by one or the other of the projectors, has no nearby whiteboard space on which to work, and the camera in the back of the room cannot pick up any detail of the instructor’s face because of the brightly illuminated background. Because all the directional lights face the audience, there are only about 15 foot-candles of light on the instructor’s face (when the projectors aren’t blinding him), so the camera in the back of the room d'es a poor job of resolving facial detail for the distance education broadcast. How unfortunate.
These three examples, all true stories, highlight some of the greatest challenges in working with this latest generation of presentation and display systems. The same trends that are leading to the next generation of systems are creating hurdles to be overcome in current product usage. So, let’s look at the trends and how they will impact (and be affected by) current technologies, then let’s look ahead to the next generation of presentation and display, and what you will need to know to get there.
Trend 1: DVI and HDMI
The DVI (Digital Visual Interface) standard was developed by the Digital Display Working Group to replace the analog VGA standard for computer graphics. The DVI standard supports bi-directional communication between the source and display device to enable them to agree upon an optimized output signal. This feature, designed for ease of use during setup, makes integration more complex when dealing with a classroom environment with multiple display devices. The five-meter maximum range of DVI also poses a challenge: Extenders are available, but since nearly every installed display device is more than 15 feet from the source, it’s clearly not integration-friendly.
DVI is seen on two connectors – DVI-I and DVI-D. The DVI-I has pins for both DVI and analog VGA. With a suitable passive breakout adaptor, you can connect a VGA display to a DVI-I equipped source. The DVI-D connector is digital-only; it will only connect to a DVI display, unless you use a DVI-to-VGA converter/scaler.
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