WIMP Interfaces for Emerging Display Environments (print-version)

With the availability of affordable large-scale monitors and powerful projector hardware, an increasing variety of display configurations can be found in our everyday environments, such as office spaces and meeting rooms. These emerging display environments combine conventional monitors and projected displays of different size, resolution, and orientation into a common interaction space. However, the commonly used WIMP (windows, icons, menus, and pointers) user interface metaphor is still based on a single pointer operating multiple overlapping windows on a single, rectangular screen. This simple concept cannot easily capture the complexity of heterogeneous display settings. As a result, the user cannot facilitate the full potential of emerging display environments using these interfaces. The focus of this thesis is to push the boundaries of conventional WIMP interfaces to enhance information management in emerging display environments. Existing and functional interfaces are extended to incorporate knowledge from two layers: the physical environment and the content of the individual windows. The thesis first addresses the technical infrastructure to construct spatially aware multi-display environments and irregular displays. Based on this infrastructure, novel WIMP interaction and information presentation techniques are demonstrated, exploiting the system’s knowledge of the environment and the window content. These techniques cover two areas: spatially-aware cross-display navigation techniques for efficient information access on remote displays and window management techniques incorporating knowledge of display form factors and window content to support information discovery, manipulation, and sharing. Results of user studies indicate that environmentand content-awareness of WIMP interfaces indeed improves information management in many varieties of emerging display environments. Awareness of the environment and the window content thereby can be facilitated without an obtrusive and expensive hardware and software infrastructure.