EmSai Projects - Widescreen: Aspect+

Aspect+

Aspect+ defines how games should handle different aspect ratios,
the goal being to give the user the best visual experience.

I'm an avid follower of the efforts of Widescreen Gaming Forum (WSGF), this effort by WSGF has pioneered widescreen gaming, and only recently (2010) has wide or surround gaming started to take off.
Unfortunately many game engines still do not handle aspect ratios that well, both ATI's Eyefinity and Nvidia's 3D Vision has made great strides towards supporting multiple screens in various configurations and aspect ratios.
The validation programs they have, combined with WSGF's certification takes us closer to aspect independent games, but there is still something lacking.

Aspect+ is a simple proposed standard for how game engines should handle unknown aspects.
Usually a game is designed under a certain aspect ratio (16:9 is the most common for modern games), and tested on 4:3 and multi-monitor setups.
The image further below indicates how the game engine should handle and support aspects that are not the same as the original developer design aspect.
In the example a game has the origin aspect of 16:9 (but could just as easily be some other aspect, it really doesn't matter).
If the user's aspect ratio is narrower than the origin, then the game engine must extend the vertical aspect ratio,
and if the user's aspect ratio is wider than the origin, then the game engine must extend the horizontal aspect ratio.

In cases where the game designers wish to keep a artistic concept, they might wish to instead use Letterboxing/Pillarboxing to retain their desired aspect ratio, this is similar to how movies are masked to fit certain aspect ratios, only the GPU will not render anything in the box area and display just black instead.
When this is done the game should provide some means for the user to toggle the boxing/masking off and on (it should default to on).
The user will now experience extended view in either the vertical or horizontal direction. (usually horizontally as it's rare for people to stack monitors vertically)

The black bars are removed (or rather un-masked), obviously the GPU and CPU load will increase somewhat since the game engine now has to render more visuals,
but the user is able to enjoy the full area of their monitors, or even arrays of monitors.
The only thing a developer need to do is ensure their game engine supports arbitrary aspect ratios, the operating system will usually include extended views in the system resolution list so no extra code should be needed there.
And most game engines should already contain logic for 4:3 and 16:9 aspects support, they just need to be tweaked to not have hard-coded aspect dependencies, this way stretched graphics can be fully avoided, any aspect ratio can be supported, and artistic look can still be maintained (but allows users to override the boxing to extend the view if they really wish to do so).

Aspect+ Standard