About the Crystal Display Wall at the Cyberinfrastructure Building (CIB) in Bloomington

• Overview
• Benefits and features
• Best practices
• System information

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Overview

The Crystal Display Wall (or Crystal Wall) is a large-format, ultra-high resolution display wall located in the Wrubel Commons of the Cyberinfrastructure Building at Indiana University Bloomington. The UITS Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) and Classroom Technology Services (CTS) brought the Crystal Wall online in January 2020, replacing the original IQ-Wall. The Crystal Wall uses micro-LED technology developed by Sony that produces a bezel-less display. The Crystal Wall is available (with help from AVL staff) to IU students, faculty, and staff for general use, presentations, and events.

The Crystal Wall is composed of 108 cabinets (18 columns, 6 rows). Each cabinet contains 12 modules, totaling 1,296 modules. The LEDs are housed in the modules, which are all seamlessly held together by the cabinets.

Benefits and features

• Large format: Facilitate multiple concurrent users, multiple content sources, or physical navigation of the data.
• High performance interaction: Take advantage of a powerful GPU, multiple CPUs, and large memory for your more challenging visualization or graphics-intensive applications.
• Run any desktop or web app: Because of underlying high-end Windows PCs, the Crystal Wall can run most Windows desktop and web-based applications in a large format at a high resolution.
• ADS login: Anyone with an IU username and passphrase can log into the Crystal Wall. Access is subject to room schedule and usage policies.
• Collaboration: The Crystal Wall supports video conferencing. Zoom works at high resolutions, and you can connect with IQ-Walls and other users.
• Multiple sources: The Crystal Wall supports displaying content from multiple sources, including the Ultra-resolution PC, the Podium PC, the Podium HDMI input, and Solstice.

The Crystal Wall and IQ-Walls share many capabilities and features. For use cases and best practices, see Use an IQ-Wall.

Best practices

Follow these tips for optimizing Crystall Wall presentations:

• PowerPoint slide size: When setting up your slides, set the slide dimensions to 24" wide by 9" tall. This will exactly match the aspect ratio of the Crystal Wall, and provide a convenient measure of scale for elements within the slides; for example, an image that is sized at 5" wide by 4" tall will be displayed on the Crystal Wall at 5' wide by 4' tall.
• PowerPoint slide background color: Since the Crystal Wall has a one-million to one contrast ratio, plain white slide backgrounds are perceived as very bright, and can be hard on the eyes of your audience. The AVL recommends that you avoid plain white for your slide backgrounds.
• PowerPoint slide templates: The AVL provides optimized template files based on official IU presentation templates, including templates specifically for IU Bicentennial or Bloomington presentations, as well as general IU presentations. The templates are available for download in Google at IU My Drive. (You must be signed into your Google at IU account to access this file; see Access Google at IU.)
• Imagery and videos: To match the native resolution of the Crystal Wall, crop and scale media that you wish to display full screen and edge to edge to a size of 5760 pixels x 2160 pixels.

Ultra-resolution PC information