Enabling Productivity with Large Displays

Over the past 30 or so years, the personal computer has developed in a remarkable fashion. There have been massive increases in memory, disk storage, CPU speed, etc. All of these developments have significantly increased the value of the PC in our lives. What other opportunities exist? One such opportunity that has occupied my time for several years now is the display. We have seen many new technologies such as the LCD and now OLED technologies and they represent real improvements. However, I have been looking at the utility of large displays. Such displays would have operating diagonal dimensions of 36 inches (about 1 meter) and larger. One such display that was built as a prototype here at Microsoft Research is a display named DSHARP. DSHARP is not a product prototype but a technology evaluator. DSHARP has an 11 x 44 inch screen size with a resolution of 3072 x 768 or TXGA (triple XGA). Extensive experiments have been done to assess user productivity and interaction experience on large displays. This talk will briefly review the DSHARP display, discuss some of our findings on how users benefit from large display areas and review what technologies might enable productizing such large displays such as MEMS, miniature projection arrays etc.