A New Method for Interacting with Multi-Window Applications on Large, High Resolution Displays

Abstract

Physically large display walls can now be constructed using off-the-shelf computer hardware. The high resolution of these displays (e.g., 50 million pixels) means that a large quantity of data can be presented to users, so the displays are well suited to visualization applications. However, current methods of interacting with display walls are somewhat time consuming. We have analyzed how users solve real visualization problems using three desktop applications (XmdvTool, Iris Explorer and Arc View), and used a new taxonomy to classify users' actions and illustrate the deficiencies of current display wall interaction methods. Following this we designed a novel method for interacting with display walls, which aims to let users interact as quickly as when a visualization application is used on a desktop system. Informal feedback gathered from our working prototype shows that interaction is both fast and fluid.