Display size

Abstract: Soon many people will retrieve information from the Web using handheld, palmsized or even smaller computers. Although these computers have dramatically increased in sophistication, their display size is — and will remain — much smaller than their conventional, desktop counterparts. Currently, browsers for these devices present Web pages without taking account of the very different display capabilities. As part of a collaborative project with Reuters, we carried out a study into the usability impact of small displays for retrieval tasks. Users of the small screen were 50% less effective in completing tasks than the large screen subjects. Small screen users used a very substantial number of scroll activities in attempting to complete the tasks. Our study also provided us with interesting insights into the shifts in approach users seem to make when using a small screen device for retrieval. These results suggest that the metaphors useful in a full screen desktop environment are not the most appropriate for the new devices. Design guidelines are discussed, here, proposing directed access methods for effective small screen interaction. In our ongoing work, we are developing such `meta-interfaces' which will sit between the small screen user and the `conventional' Web page.

Abstract: A touchscreen interface for a sound processing system, such as music synthesizers, which has a display panel and a touch sensitive panel overlying the display panel, includes an icon which represents an adjustable parameter used by the processing system. The processing resources supply a variable adjustment display to the display panel in response to a touch on the position of the icon, using pop-up slider or pop-up knob motif. The variable adjustment display overlies the interface display and has a size on the touch sensitive panel larger than the size of the icon to facilitate manipulation of the variable using a finger over a significant range of values. The variable adjustment display pops up when touched to obscure a portion of the graphical display used for the interface. When the variable is adjusted using the touch sequence, the variable adjustment display is removed, and the interface display is left unobscured. This allows the user to manipulate a particular variable while maintaining the window which shows the values of related variables on the screen. By maintaining the current window on the screen, the user is less likely to get lost in a hierarchy of windows used for setting variables.

Abstract: The number of different screens that people confront is increasing. One potentially important difference in the psychological impact of screen displays is their size; new screens are both larger and smaller than older ones. A between-subjects experiment (n = 38) assessed viewer's attention and arousal in response to three different size screens (56-inch, 13-inch, and 2-inch picture heights). Viewers responded to video images from television and film that displayed different emotions (# video segments = 60). Attention was measured by heart rate deceleration in response to the onset of pictures, and arousal was measured by skin conductance aggregated during viewing. Results showed that the largest screen produced greater heart rate deceleration than the medium and small screens. The large screen also produced greater skin conductance than the medium and small screens. For skin conductance, screen size also interacted with the emotional content of the stimuli such that the most arousing pictures (e.g., pictu...

Abstract: A new super multi-view (SMV) display system that enables the number of views to be increased is proposed. All three-dimensional (3D) images generated by multiple multi-view flat-panel displays are superimposed on a common screen using a multi-projection system. The viewing zones of the flat-panel 3D display are produced in the pupils of the projection lenses and then imaged to the observation space by a screen lens. Sixteen flat-panel 3D displays having 16 views were used to construct a SMV display having 256 views. The 3D resolution was 256 x 192. The screen size was 10.3 inches. The horizontal interval of the viewing zones was 1.3 mm.