Focus plus context screens

Patrick Baudisch, Nathan Good,and Paul Stewart

UIST 2001,

November 11th 2001

• Hardware– At least one hi-res display– At least one larger low-res display

• Software– scaling of the display content is preserved– resolution varies

<baudisch@parc.xerox.com>

Contents

• 1. What it is

• 2. How it works

• 3. What it is good for (video)

• 4. Software

• 5. Evaluation and conclusions

How to build it?

Setup

Seamless integration of displays

a b

Context

No reflections on focus screen

Focus

What is it good for?

• <Show video here>

How does it work?

The scaling software

• Display image on two display units of different resolution– Similar to two-headed display– but display units are overlapping– and one of them has to be scaled down

• (Related work “Flux capacitor”[Dr. Emmett Brown, 1985])

Linux/VNC

app

focus

contextinput

server

clip

scale

viewer

viewer

Image viewer

context

Photoshop

scale

ACDsee

ACDsee

.gif

.gif

mousefork

input

focus

Evaluation

focus plus context screen VisualizationSame # of pixels

fisheye

55

overview plus detail

44

Display technology

homogeneous resolution

44wall-size, hi-res display

44

Evaluation

• Field study– 12 professionals, 2 gamers– Nobody uses overview plus detail– A list of tasks for the experiments

• 1st exp: large static documents– Task completion: 21% and 36% faster

• 2nd exp: dynamic dual attention task– Error rate only 1/3 of two-monitor setup

What we learned

• We thought:Chip designers need it

• We learned:Real strength is dynamic content– Have unexpected context information– Two monitoring tasks at the same time

Try it out!Try it out!

• Demo: Tuesday 5.15Demo: Tuesday 5.15

END