Guest editorial of the special issue on improving display and rendering technologies for virtual environments

Since Ivan Sutherland’s pioneering and groundbreaking article ‘The ultimate display’ from 1965, display developers and information technology scientists, especially from the computer graphics field, are longing for a lightweight, stereoscopic optical see-through near-to-the-eye display which enables to merge the real physical environment and computer-generated scenery seamlessly together. For this reason, great attention is being devoted to research aiming at investigating the potential of lightweight near-to-the-eye displays and tiled stereoscopic large size displays in conjunction with advanced and innovative 2D/3D interaction techniques, to evaluate the applicability in collaborative industrial product development process. The five papers included in this special issue cover different representative contexts of use of tiled display technology, realistic real-time rendering to seamlessly combine virtual and real objects, new real-time interaction metaphors for human–computer interaction within large-scale VR scenarios, low-cost real-time marker-less large-area tracking systems and applicability of both types of display devices (near-to-the-eye and large-screen displays) in the collaborative industrial product development process.