Some people definitely have jobs that are more fun than mine. Take a look at Patrick Baudisch's projects and you'll see what I mean - his job is probably more fun than yours is too. Patrick works for Microsoft Research, one of the great sources of innovative ideas, even if its parent organization is the Borg. Whatever. This post is about toys, not commerce or politics.
I got turned on to his work through a recent article in IEEE Computer that I finally got to read over lunch today. The article was called Interacting With Large Displays, and it describes some of his work regarding the pains that accompany the joy of having a wall-size display "monitor" for your computer. His solutions for these problems are truly fascinating.
Regarding these pains and joys of the large display interface, he writes:
To explore usability issues related to wall-size and tabletop displays, we developed a series of prototype applications for image viewing and video conferencing, as well as a simple driving simulation, and performed numerous in-house studies.
We found that large displays offer a broad range of benefits, from increasing users’ task-management performance to improving their spatial abilities. Alongside these benefits, however, several problems became apparent to us.
Many key desktop interaction paradigms “broke” when we tried to apply them to the focus-plus-context screen. For example, the sheer size of the display caused users to lose track of the mouse pointer; the display’s large size also made it difficult to reach distant content using touch or pen input. In addition, those techniques that did seem to transfer often suffered from limited accuracy due to the large screen’s inferior tracking capability.
How I imagine this getting started: "Dang, I was off for a four day weekend, and when I came back the furniture police turned that big blank wall out in the hallway into a seven-foot-high by twenty-foot-wide monitor... Guess I'll have to write some prototype applications for it."
This article helps you become aware of the mental enclosure any user interface metaphor creates, an enclosure as invisible to you as water is to a fish. Let's start with drag-and-drop. A great idea, right? Well, maybe not so great if you have to click and drag that item ten or twelve feet before you drop it.
Patrick's answer: Drag-and-pop.
Drag-and-pop is an extension of traditional drag-and-drop. As the user starts dragging an icon towards some target icon, drag-and-pop responds by temporarily moving potential target icons towards the user’s current cursor location, thereby allowing the user to interact with these icons using comparably small hand movements. Drag-and-Pick extends the drag-and-pop interaction style such that it allows activating icons, e.g., to open folders or launch applications.
Cehck out the flash demo and you can get a good idea of what he's talking about. There's also a 50MB movie demo if you have tons of bandwidth and can't or won't install Flash.
There's more - my favorites are snap-and-go and the dual-finger selection techniques. But work beckons, so that's all for now.
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