Vast: An Open Source Web Framework Extending the Responsive Web to Large Scale Display Systems

Clemson, SC

With the proliferation and diversification of personal devices that display web content, the success of the web as an effective communication medium has been driven in part by the establishment of tools and practices that allow developers to cater the appearance and experience of web content to the specifications of an end user’s device. A common approach to delivering “fluid” web content is responsive web design–a set of practices utilizing an end user’s device metrics (e.g., viewport size, resolution, aspect ratio) with conditional coding methods to modify the design of screen content. Similar to personal devices, the landscape of large scale display system specifications is diverse. However, given the relative uniqueness of these systems, content is often developed to meet the distinct specifications of a singular display and is not easily transferable to other display systems. Implementing web development technologies that incorporate responsive web design present a powerful platform to expand the scope of immersive visualization projects, opening up new possibilities for content and exhibits optimized for viewing across varied large scale displays as well as personal devices. Motivated by this opportunity we developed Vast, an open source web framework extending the responsive web to large scale display systems. Built on Foundation, an industry-standard styling framework providing a suite of design style defaults, layout components, and utilities for developing responsive web content, Vast extends this existing framework to incorporate the added complexities of displaying responsive content on large scale displays such as unique display size and aspect, content size, resolution of content, and viewing distances. Vast serves to support the scalability and dissemination of web-based immersive content and to democratize the creation of digital content for immersive environments. This presentation provides an overview of the Vast framework and articulates our motivation, development process, and provides explicit use cases.