HN Request: Borderless Screens

[ice_man]

To any hardware hackers in the audience, I ask you this: Is it really technologically impossible to create screens without borders? If not, can someone please invent one already? This whole border thing is getting old. If my screen didn't have a border, I could stack it next to other screens to expand the viewable area. If there was some intelligent software behind the scenes making the whole stacking process seamless, the possibilities would be endless. For example, wouldn't it be great if we could literally drag content between two mobile devices, or a mobile device and a desktop computer. Just a thought.

[modeless]

I doubt you could make the border smaller than a pixel; pixels are tiny these days. Having worked with display walls in the past, even a 1-pixel border between displays is really distracting, to the point where I'd rather just use the 2 displays separately as in a normal dual-head setup.

If you really need a borderless display the way to do it is with a projector. You can seamlessly combine projectors to create a display as big as you want. Normally the projected images are overlapped a few pixels on each side and blended together to cover up alignment issues. I'm certain this is how they make that enormous display that towers behind Steve Jobs during his keynotes at Moscone Center.

If you're interested in joining the displays from multiple computers together, check out http://code.google.com/p/synergy-plus/ . It's like VNC in reverse.

Also, X Windows theoretically allows moving running application windows from one device to another but I don't think any implementations really support it.

[Ennis]

You present 2 separate issues. The latter about moving items visually between devices in a seamless way is being worked on and I recall exists in some form. I don't remember exactly where I saw it but I'll update if I think of it.

The second issue is having LCD or LED flat panels without the border. It is technically possible. You cant just take the border off. Some sort of surrounding protection is needed or else you will end up with dead pixels all around which makes it look like an ugly border. The screen won't survive long either.

It's possible to wrap it up in plexi-glass or a similar material. I don''t know how you can avoid any refraction at the edges. Even the slightest oddity ruins the point of piecing screens together.

The real question is why do you want to do this? It will be much more expensive to piece together screens to make one large screen than it would be to buy the large screen. Big screens are pretty darn cheap now. I don't know how much room there is for the price to go any lower. It is still a manufacturing process that is based on preciseness - so there will be wasted units that add to the overall cost.

I'm not sure if that answers your questions or if you specific technical details. Either way I would love to see something like it for the coolness factor!!

[ice_man]

I just think the whole notion of borders on screens is very limiting. A digital screen is like digital real estate and I want to be able to expand it more organically than I am currently able to. I think that in the absence of borders, a slew of interesting applications would emerge. I don't have the resources to implement this myself, but I would love it if someone else did. :)