Technical help - 2x2 projector output

Okay, this isn't a VJ-hire ad, but a call for help.

A friend is (supposedly...) doing an installation in Sydney in a few days for a music/light festival, and I've been asked to help make it work.

I'm looking at building an application to display images (and maybe also video) on 2x2 XGA outputs (4 video projectors), that is with total pixel dimensions of 2048x1536.

I've discounted Processing as not up to the task (on advisement without actually testing it out), and instead have been looking at things like OpenFrameworks, OGRE, Irrlicht, FlatRedBall and SlimDX.

I've read a few scraps here and there that suggest OpenGL doesn't play nice across multiple screens, nor does video, and I'm having nightmares with Visual C# (2008 Express) generating an AccessViolationException for some reason before I can even get to a breakpoint in the main function.

Other issues include the SlimDX library apparently being built for x64, and a general overwhelmedness by the game/graphics engine APIs.

Advice/guidance (and code, compiler settings, etc!) sought.

-spxl

I think Salvation will do it for you: http://www.harrisondigitalmedia.com/

Hmm. It might be possible, though it seems unlikely. I think I will press on with OpenFrameworks for now. Running through the "reinstall" option, to my frustration, did not fix the AceessViolationException problem in VC#. I installed VC++ (2008 Express Edition) hoping that would be a nicer environment that CodeBlocks, but it seemed that a demo that worked when compiled with MinGW is strangely absent of mouse interaction, so I don't trust it any further than that!

-spxl

I revisited the VC++ possibility and things seemed okay (I don't remember exactly what the "no mouse interactivity" issue sprung from, but I think it was due to a boolean variable not having been initialised in the demo program - bad!) until I decided to try to build a library for OpenFrameworks which ended in a screaming heap - the linker complaining about things apparently compiled with different versions of the compiler... How the smeg do you fix that?!

Anyhow, after several such frustrations I eventually went back to plain OpenFrameworks with no additional libraries in Code::Blocks and did everything else "by hand" as it were.

Opening a single large window that covered all four screens presented by the dual graphics cards (arranged in the Display Properties > Settings tab in a 2x2 grid) was successful for showing both "static" (.jpg and .png files) and video (QuickTime .mov files) content. I don't know what the performance of the spanning is like, but it is apparently good enough for this application.

I had nightmares with a threading problem, loading images from disk using a separate thread, that I eventually solved while still in Rome after LPM - not the best way to spend holiday!

In the end the installation appears to have been a success. Perhaps not as great as Brian Eno's lighting of the Sydney Opera House's sails (part of the same festival), but I'd say practically anything projected on the Opera House is going to be the biggest spectacle!

Project Site -- http://www.weatherprojection.co.uk/
Festival Page -- http://www.smartlightsydney.com/artists/alex-haw

-spxl