Zero-Bezel Mirror Box for Eyefinity/Surround - Setup
Installation & Setup
Once the wood box was finished and the monitors mounted, it was time to add the half-mirror. Now, I considered several options for this glass. I got a sample piece of two-way mirror from a local glass shop, but it was tinted and it altered the color too much. Then, I went online and checked locally for beam splitter (a.k.a teleprompter) glass, but the cost was waaay too high for this prototype project. Finally, I settled on a piece of clear glass with a semi-silver tint from the local tint shop.
The next step is to hook up the center monitor to a mirror-flip inverter so the center image appears correctly when reflected on the half-mirror. This was by far the most expensive component of the prototype. :thumbdown:
Once the glass was mounted, then came aligning the monitors. Now ideally, the display areas of the vertical and horizontal monitors would be *exactly* the same distance from the half-mirror glass. Also, the glass would be mounted at a *perfect* 45 degree angle. Then, the two vertical mounted monitors would slide left & right and the horizontal mounted monitor would slide back and forth until the display areas lined up perfectly. Once this happens, you can move from side to side of the box and the bezels are gone!
Well, this being a prototype, the glass wasn’t quite a perfect 45 degrees and it was extremely difficult to manually get the monitors to be the same distance from the glass. This was an inherent design flaw in this prototype- the vertical mounted monitors only moved left to right but also needed to move front to back. (The verticals ended up a slightly different distance from the glass as the horizontal monitor). But… I was still able to get a pretty damn good alignment that looks really good if you are sitting in the center of the display.
Note that I still haven’t gotten the brightness/contrast adjusted to be the same on all of the monitors, but the color is very close. Also, the last pic above looks like there are lines between the monitors when viewed from the side. This is due to the vertical monitors being slightly further away from the half-mirror.