Raspberry Pi-Based Info-Beamer Sets Up Video Walls In Seconds With QR Code-Like GPS Tags

August 18, 2017 by Dave Haynes

I’m nowhere near smart enough to properly explain this, but suffice to say a start-up that works with Raspberry Pis for a digital signage solution has  come up with a way for users to rapidly set up video walls using a smartphone app and little visual tags that provide GPS coordinates.

The AprilTag detection software computes the precise 3D position, orientation, and identity of tags (in this case on screens), relative to the camera.

This is what Florian Wesch of the German firm InfoBeamer says:

You can create a video wall consisting of freely arranged screens in seconds. The screens don’t even have to be planar. Just rotate and place them as you like. Configuration is as simple as creating a picture of your screens once you’ve physically set them up. The rest is completely automatic: You don’t have to configure screen resolutions, orientation, size or anything else really. You just have to take a picture. It can’t get easier.

The package is available on https://info-beamer.com/pkg/3028 and can be installed on your Raspberry Pis with a few clicks. Be sure to follow info-beamer on twitter at https://twitter.com/infobeamer for more exciting projects in the future.

If you wonder how this works: During configuration I show different AprilTags (See https://april.eecs.umich.edu/software…) on each screen. Using those the configuration page is able to detect each screens location and transformation in the configuration picture. This can then be used on each Pi to adjust their output so it looks correct from the point of the configuration picture.

Watch the video …

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