Wideband Visual Interfaces: Sensemaking on Multiple Monitors

Although vendors have made multiple-monitor systems for many years, our interfaces have been stuck in a 30-year old windows paradigm focused on displays much smaller than the desktops we use when working with paper. Advances in flat panel displays and graphics cards now enable affordable personal computers with 6-8 monitors and may someday eliminate seams. This paper argues that vendors should be developing wideband visual interfaces that are designed for displays that fill the human visual field. We describe a longitudinal field study of window activity that found that windows almost always filled a typical single monitor display and that subjects occasionally struggled with window thrashing when they needed to work with two or more windows at the same time. Vendors need not wait for affordable seamless wideband displays before addressing these findings. We have implemented several novel user interface techniques for creating seam-aware applications that target wideband displays based on multiple monitors. Author