Hey, what's up. I've been lurking around these forums for some time, but never got my lazy self around to registering and commenting. Seeing this discussion on the HDR display, a topic near and dear to me (being one of the authors, and a Sunnybrook employee), I figured this would be an ideal time to register and throw what I know into the fray. It's probably best to just do one monster post replying to everyone's comments as best I am able to.
The basic concept described is right. We take an off-the-shelf LCD panel, and stick a bunch of LEDs behind it. You can control them all separately, so you have a low-res monochrome HDR backlight, and a high-res color LDR front panel. You drive these in tandem to achieve the full dynamic range. The basic idea is a solution for the fact that LCD panels can only block so much light. If you want, brighter brights, without what we do, you get brighter darks as well.
Apple740 : No, it runs as fast as a norwal display with GPU-based image processing.
Bjorn : That sony display is a completely different backlight technology, though it is true that they both use LEDs. The Sony (and NEC has one as well) use 3 different color LEDs to improve the color gamut of the display. (Note that in this case, "colors" in the sense that you display has 16 million "colors" is not the same. I mean color gamut, the most saturated chromacity that can be displayed. This has nothing to do with the intensity of the light.) The HDR display, on the other hand, uses LEDs to create a spatially-variant backlight that can be considerably brighter (and darker) than a normal display. The LEDs used have roughly the same spectra as a coventional LCD backlight, and to nothing to improve the gamut.
aranfell : The lens in your eyes in considerably lower quality than optical glass. If you look at a bright point (roughly 150x brighter than the surround), light leaks over into the dark surround, obscuring the detail. So you can have errors in the surround you can't see.
Remi : Yes, there are fairly effective ways to fake it that look good.
Chalnoth : Because there are only a few LED values, we can pack the entire backlight into a single scanline of the DVI signal.
Mintmaster : All the movie studios process in HDR. They throw away tons of data when they bake a DVD for you. For text on a white background 100:1 contrast is great. I can assure you, at Siggraph, pretty much everyone who saw videos on it wanted one. The real world has more dynamic range than your TV. Many people want to see that.
Brimstone : It'd take any game studio with an HDR render engine less than a week to drop in the SDK and output to the display.
Mintmaster : The dynamic range of film is greater than an LCD monitor. Movie studios are dying for these for their compositors and lighting designers.
Fred da Rosa : Several are under discussion.
Alright. Phew. That's a start on answering some questions. It's all a very simplistic view of what we are doing but is a start. I'll be glad to answer more questions within my ability. I'm trying to get some good comprehensive write-ups on HDR in general, the specifics on the display, and especially the psychophysics involved since that is the most foreign to CS people. Other than that, have a look at the paper if you are interested :
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mmt/Siggraph.04.pdf
