Framework for effective use of multiple displays

Meeting environments, such as conference rooms, executive briefing centers, and exhibition spaces, are now commonly equipped with multiple displays, and will become increasingly display-rich in the future. Existing authoring / presentation tools such as PowerPoint, however, provide little support for effective utilization of multiple displays. Even using advanced multi-display enabled multimedia presentation tools, the task of assigning material to displays is tedious and distracts presenters from focusing on content. This paper describes a framework for automatically assigning presentation material to displays, based on a model of the quality of views of audience members. The framework is based on a model of visual fidelity which takes into account presentation content, audience members’ locations, the limited resolution of human eyes, and display location, orientation, size, resolution, and frame rate. The model can be used to determine presentation material placement based on average or worst case audience member view quality, and to warn about material that would be illegible. By integrating this framework with a previous system for multi-display presentation [PreAuthor, others], we created a tool that accepts PowerPoint and/or other media input files, and automatically generates a layout of material onto displays for each state of the presentation. The tool also provides an interface allowing the presenter to modify the automatically generated layout before or during the actual presentation. This paper discusses the framework, possible application scenarios, examples of the system behavior, and our experience with system use.