Various technologies exist for controlling the appearance and relative position/scale (layout) of multiple media sources on a display. For example, video wall scalars and switchers allow a user to inject control commands into a video routing system that impacts the appearance of the video sources on a single shared display. Video wall control commands necessarily modify the shared appearance of the main display—that is, if a media source is scaled larger on the display—it is scaled for all viewers of that single shared display. At the other end of the spectrum, some systems support individual control that is different from the shared view. For example, some video teleconferencing software systems allow individual users to scale a video stream of a document or web camera view in their own interface, in the absence of a shared view.
As a result, these existing technologies do not address the needs of a distributed visualization system that includes both a host display system that provides a synchronous view of the various media streams and individual (but synchronized) views of that same system on each of the connected source computers. What is needed is a mechanism that allows users to control a shared display surface and to simultaneously view that shared display on connected devices in a way the supports group collaboration and individual viewing of each of the shared media sources, without modifying the main shared display screen.
Consider the case, for example, when four source computers, each connected to a shared display a sharing media sources simultaneously. Assume the shared display is a 1920×1080 resolution screen. If each computer is sharing a single 1920×1080 resolution media stream and all four sources are being shown on the shared display equally, then, at most, any individual source resolution is (1920/2)×(1080/2)=960×540. While this is useful for comparative viewing of different, typically disparate, sources of media, information is necessarily lost. Furthermore, systems that display a replica of the shared display media on each of the individual computers may further reduce the resolution of each displayed media source so that it fits within a constrained user interface.