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nochesbellas 2005-05-14 08:51
Ok, here's something you ALL can relate to: You place two (or more) monitors next to each other, but when you move windows between them (or display a wallpaper) it looks distorted at the edges where the two monitors meet because the multimonitor software does not have an option to account for the physical space between monitors.
So I'd like an utility that allows me to specify how many pixels I think there are between each monitor so that they can be "skipped" and thus the image looks seamlessly between the two monitors.
Example:
Image a human face displayed right in between 2 monitors. You'd see an eye on the left, an eye on the right, and half the nose on each side. What I want to do is *hide* the nose because it falls right in-between the two physical monitor screens. This is great for flight simulators, advertising, wallpapers, etc.
So, does an utility to do this exist???
Noche.
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Jonsky 2005-05-14 13:45
Can you increase the width of each display?
CRT's you could just widen the picture a bit on each display, off the screen till they theortically meet in the middle if you catch my drift.
The manual image adjust fuction on my TFT's are greyed out, not sure if thats because they're using dvi cables. I can't find an option in the Nvidia drivers to expand the picture.
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ECarlson 2005-05-14 13:57
The first thing that comes to mind is that you can create your own wallpaper in a graphics editor program, and leave out the parts you feel should be missing. I suppose you could create your own videos that way too, but it would probably be more difficult.
I'm not aware of a way to get Windows to actually account for the missing space. Maybe somebody could develop a virtual display adapter, so you could create a separate virtual monitor the size of the gap, and place it where the gap is.
Perhaps you could do it with MaxiVista, if it allows for a remote screen of the exact size you want, that way you could actually display the missing piece on another screen, which could be interesting.
- Eric, www.InvisibleRobot.com
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nochesbellas 2005-05-14 14:46
I actually created my own wallpaper by substracting the middle gap section myself, and it looks pretty impressive. I really can't believe noone (including microsoft) has not tought of this before and came up with a checkbox option (along with a box to enter a value in pixels/inches/cm to use for the gap).
Noche
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ECarlson 2005-05-15 02:33
You're the first person I've heard mention the desire for this feature. It does make sense for wallpaper and screensavers, but if I had a spreadsheet expanded across my monitors, I wouldn't want any of the information to be chopped out, so it wouldn't be useful for office productivity applications.
Hopefully someday, monitor bezels will be so thin that you don't really notice a gap between monitors. In fact, I can see monitors someday being made where the image goes right to all 4 edges, then the image could be unbroken across a grid of monitors, and you could use lots of monitors to make any size display you wanted.
- Eric, www.InvisibleRobot.com
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nochesbellas 2005-05-15 04:35
Eric,
You're completelly right on your spreadsheet example (and there tons more examples), this is why I suggested it should be a display preferences option, where you click a checkbox if you want to enable that feature, and then a little box appears where you specify the width of the gap in pixels :)
It just bothers me to see things like a flight simulator on current setups (where the movement, specially when the horizon is in a diagonal, feels out of place), but with this feature the monitor gap will actually feel like part of the airplane fusselage window you're playing, enhancing the experience much more. In my case though, I really want that for showing images and videos to customers, because in all cases they notice the gap and it takes a while to adjust your head at seeing people and objects wider than usual because of the gap. Much more distracting than having the gap itself.
Noche.
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Mike 2005-05-15 15:50
Would it be possible to add the feature to Ultramon?
It gives me an options for wallpaper: Center, Tile, Stretch, Stretch Proportional. Could we add an option to Add X amount of space between images?
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Slackmaster K 2005-05-16 05:16
That's doable, but there are only two ways I see this working and neither of them is really good:
1) Create a virtual monitor between the two physical ones running in, say, 1600x400 or 400x1200 depending on your orientation and resolution of course. This would make it probable to leave windows hiding in the lost areas, as people tend to drop a window while dragging and things move whenever resolutions change. This also has the undesired effect of leaving that virtual space the same when switching resolutions. If this was done when playing a game that supports full screen on multiple monitors, some really wierd effects would take place in game.
2) Have UltraMon redraw the image in such a way as to squish the slack space to zero pixels and re-expand them when they move far enough over. This would add an element of choppiness and lag, which nobody wants to live with.
As you can see, there's really no way to do this without undesired side effects. On the plus side, better monitors are coming. The one that really got my attention is the membrane screen. It's a monitor that's printed onto a flexible plasticy surface that can be bent at slight angles, oriented any way imaginable, and even rolled up for transport. I haven't seen this in practice, but I have read several papers on it and it looks promising once they get resolutions and colors up to an acceptable level. These flex screens have no bevel, and if they're installed into one they could probably be removed with minimal effort. The part that bothers me is trying to figure out how they're going to mount the input port to them; the port would be thicker than the whole screen and that's just not structurally sound.
Slackmaster K
President, IDXT Computing
www.idxt.biz
Kevin@idxt.biz
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nochesbellas 2005-05-16 15:18
Hey there! Here's a possible way to do your proposed Case 1 Solution:
1. First, give the option to do the "gap filling" trick with a virtual screen ONLY if both monitors have the same resolution, else dissable it if you detect that all monitors are not set to the same resolution.
2. I don't worry about leaving windows or icons behind the gap, as I can once in a while dissable the gap-filling feature and check what's behind it.
3. I don't understand your game example. Do you mean cases when the game changes the resolution of the monitors? Why can't they change the resolution of a virtual monitor? (sorry for my ignorance on this topic).
--
Now here's another possible solution: Can you create a screen (say, the left monitor) that is 200 pixels (or whatever the amount) wider than the actual desired resolution, but ONLY display the desired resolution? i.e.: Create a 1224x768 screen in memory but only display 1024x768 on the monitor, thus hiding the right-most 200 pixels which is what we want. This also means we get hardware acceleration (which we might not get with a virtual monitor approach). Could this be done??? :-)
Noche.
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Russell 2005-06-01 22:44
Sony did a notebook a few years ago where the lcd was only mounted from behind so so the bezel was almost non existant...
So its possible bezels will go completely eventually.
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MP 2008-01-09 11:24
Sorry to bump this. But I'm really interested if there are some new developments in this area? The only only thing I really hate about the dual screen setup I have is the 'jump' everything makes due to the borders of the screens (and mine are actually not that wide!).
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ecarlson 2008-01-09 12:32
The Matrox TripleHead2Go Digital Edition has "Monitor Bezel Management". Scroll down on the linked page to see their example, and google for reviews and additional information.
- Eric, www.InvisibleRobot.com
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Ken830 2008-08-21 10:13
This doesn't need to be a feature during normal operations. It only needs to be an option for the wallpapers that span multiple monitors. That will please the majority of the people right there!
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ECarlson 2008-08-23 14:39
You can easily edit your own wallpaper to account for the gaps if that's all you need.
- Eric, www.InvisibleRobot.com
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Pixmanven 2009-02-28 10:39
This is a mayor issue for any application involving several monitors and video. The BEZEL CORRECTION allows you to have a "Through the Window" like view instead of a multiple and unrelated snap shots.
The "windows" view allows the brain to build a single image that appears behind the monitors, effectively erasing the bezel. This is the principle used on cropped images you see on advertising billboards. Next time you look trough a window see how your brain "erases" the window frames (off course there is also the depth of field issue which also helps).
This is a mayor issue on achieving realistic, X HD images using multiple monitors.
PixmanVen
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Bolkar 2009-05-20 11:12
This will be a very cool addition to a future version. Just for the Wallpaper section. It cuts a piece of the wallpaper and stretches the remaining part. Effectively distorting the wallpaper a little, but I think the benefit will be worth the hardly noticeable distortion.
I have tons of wallpapers for a dual 30" setup. It would be a pain to edit all those images for this (hmmm, I believe I can set an action script in photoshop to do this to all the files)
Anyway, I thought it would be cool to add.
It seems like finding new features to add became an issue as of lately...
-Bolkar
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Anders 2009-09-20 00:59
I have been scanning fora for weeks, trying to find a fix for this issue.
I too would like such an option, preferable with a hotkey to go with it.
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Austin Hastings 2009-11-03 00:16
Another bump. I've been searching for a while for this ability.
In case nobody has thought of it, the solution I have been searching for is to just get Windows to allow me to specify the position of my monitors as being "a little farther apart."
For instance, my "1" monitor is in the center, and is a 22" arranged vertically - so 1680h x 1050w. My "3" monitor is on the right, and for some reason Windows has it at position (1048, 0). Which means 2 px of overlap, natch.
I want "underlap." I want to be able to position that monitor at (1200, 0) to allow for the gap, and to provide some separation. I *want* anything in that gap to be invisible, because I want the monitors isolated.
In my case I'm not trying to simulate window frames or anything, I just want to isolate the windows. And if I have a spreadsheet, or whatever, well, the whole thing about losing cells is a non-starter, because (a) I don't do that; and (b) I've got three 22-inch monitors side-by-side - I'm not gonna lose anything! Hahahahaha!! (PS: I love UltraMon for making this so much fun.)
=Austin
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Adam 2009-12-06 02:27
I'm also interested in this, but for a slightly different use. I am using dual monitors where I run a virtual machine in the second monitor. For example I run Windows 7 in the left monitor and Ubuntu Linux (in VirtualBox) in the right monitor.
I would like to be able to prevent my Windows 7 windows from overlapping my Linux desktop. A central "virtual monitor" or "dead space" could prevent this very easily.
I can do this in Linux simply, where I run Ubuntu Linux in the left monitor and Windows 7 (in VirtualBox) in the right monitor. I simply specify that the location of the top left side of the left monitor is at position (0, 0) and the right monitor is positioned at some far away location to the right, e.g. (5000, 0).
This is not ideal for certain scenarios, because the space between them (from pixels 1281 to 4999) cannot be reached by the mouse, so I cannot access the right monitor by dragging my mouse across (I use a keyboard shortcut workaround).
For other scenarios, such as running MediaCenter in the left monitor but still being able to work on the right monitor, this situation is great, as it prevents the mouse from "slipping" over to the MediaCenter monitor.
It would be great to have this type of utility with UltraMon!
Adam
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