Anaheim (CA) - At this week’s InfoComm audio/video trade show, a new company called Mersive debuted a new technology that it’s calling "ultra definition".

Mersive, which has a background mostly rooted in military simulation applications, has created technology that can sync over a dozen projection screens together and display images and video with up to 14 times the amount of pixels of regular HD screens, or 27 million pixels.

At the company’s booth, it showed off a screen 26 feet wide with an image resolution cleaner than that of a movie theater. Flight simulations and planetarium-style views of the solar system showed off the technology in a breathtaking way.

Mersive’s product is actually a server, titled the Mersive Sol server, that uses a proprietary software application to enable the display functionality. The server costs $7500 and a $5000 license fee is tacked on to each projector used in the project. So to use the Mersive software and hardware on the 26-foot screen we saw, which uses 15 projectors, it would cost around $82,000. That type of application is just in prototype form right now.

The company also uses a software platform called Stingray to allow collaboration of displays from multiple computers. We talked with the president and CEO of Mersive, Randall Stevens, who told us how this sort of thing could be used in the retail market. For example, he said, Starbucks could put up a huge video wall and let users put up their own images in real-time for the entire store to see, in addition to pictures and ads put up by the coffee shop itself. 

With a nod from the National Science Foundation, Mersive hopes to bring this concept into the real market, and is working on finding partners to do so. 

A slightly smaller scale version of the technology is already being sold by Mersive, with full installation of all components, with a price tag right around a cool $100,000.