🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <619@ardent.UUCP>, sleat@ardent.UUCP (Michael Sleator) writes about
using trios of red, green and blue LEDS to make a big screen:
> 
> I could use a few hundred thousand of such devices (or even a few thousand,
> actually).  I can't think what I'd do with just one. :-) :-)  The interesting
> question is just what would you have the imbedded controller do?  (I can
> see it now:  PixelPlanes with a trio of LED's per processor!!!  Quick!
> Someone call Henry Fuchs!  (you could make some pretty amazing billboards))
> 

Sorry, but someone in the Pixel-Planes group already came up with
something like this. I remember reading a grant proposal a while back
saying that we should deposit the Pixel-Planes processors on the back
of a color LCD screen, with the processors directly controlling the
liquid crystal. It is an interesting idea: a color graphics display
that does all the pixel processing. All you add is a floating point
engine to generate linear coefficients from polygons, and you have a
graphics system.

The process of depositing VLSI circuits on the back of a glass sheet
was (and still is) too far off in the future for serious consideration,
so that idea was dropped. The billboard idea could be done today if you
could find someone to pay for it.

David Ellsworth
Pixel-Planes Project at the University of North Carolina
ellswort@unc.cs.unc.edu