novel visualization and interaction for large displays mary czerwinski microsoft research

vibe team Patrick Baudisch Mary Czerwinski Brian Meyers George Robertson Greg Smith Daniel Robbins Desney Tan Nuria Oliver

large display surfaces are here Workstation in the real world

home setup Generic snapshot in real person’s bedroom

overview initial large display research –prototypes around usability issues observed visualization and interaction –new user experiences have to scale the wide continuum of displays future directions

harris poll responses (7/02, N=1197)

why a larger display surface? productivity benefits 10-30% (despite sw usability issues) users prefer more display surface prices dropping fast footprints getting smaller

1 st prototype--dSharp display triple projection matrox parhelia card 3028 x764 resolution 42 in. across slightly curved 120 degree FOV

task times – significant

user satisfaction - significant

windows layout - significant

but…usability issues why click to bring a clearly visible window into focus? caused many errors where is my cursor? where is my start button? where is my taskbar? where are my dialogs? the software doesn’t know where the bezel is…

input: high density cursor

input: drag-and-pop problem large displays create long distance mouse movement touch & pen input has problems moving between screen units solution drag-and-pop brings proxies of targets to the user from across display surfaces the user can complete drag interactions locally—no need to deal with distances or to cross display borders

vibelog: 2 research paths 1st activity repository for studying windows usage in aggregate –can profile users based on display size –can be extended to visualize workflow and capture context single user: capture task contexts to surface pertinent ui or provide reminders

windows and task management issues emerge larger displays = more open windows multimon users arrange windows spatially taskbar does not scale: –aggregation model not task-based –users can’t operate on groups of related windows

changes in window access patterns

multitasking support vibelog projectbar, layoutbar, groupbar scalable fabric

task management: groupbar taskbar for lightweight grouping of windows allows for multiple bars, spatial placement of bars ~400 internal downloads desktop snapshotting; task snapshots licensing to external companies

task management: scalable fabric configurable central focus + peripheral context easy task switch from periphery to focus area leverages human spatial memory over 600 downloads, licensing externally

table cloth problem: –user wants to access content physically far away solution: –pan the desktop to user –compress content to the right of focus –grab content you need and snap back

meeting support: wincutswincuts microsoft supports: –individual user productivity (eg. word, excel, …) –disseminating information (eg. powerpoint, sharepoint, …) –communication (eg. outlook, MSN messenger, …) –distance collaboration (eg. Netmeeting, Livemeeting, …) but what about co-located collaborative work? –people bring different expertise and information on personal devices to meetings and need to share today’s model is broken—only one person gets to display entire desktop at a time (for better or worse) or, must share applications and files with others –what about private information? what about ui that should be scaled for the task at hand?

scalable ui research datelens with Ben Bederson facetmap—visualizing your digital memories

datelens with Ben Bederson fisheye representation of dates compact overviews user control over the view integrated search (keyword) enables overviews, fluid navigation to discover patterns and outliers integrated with outlook

facetmap a way to visualize all of your digital memories –soon, everything will be recorded heart rate, blood oxygen levels, conversations, where you go, who you talk to, what you touch electronically, etc. –need ways to browse all these streams of media most studying text lists of search results can we do something purely visually that scales?

future vibe directions novel interaction and visualization techniques that scale from small to very large displays continued evaluation and iteration of designs from a user-centered perspective more focus on collaboration and group awareness with large displays more information:

thank you!