No abstract

The advent of ultra-high resolution wall-size displays and their use for complex tasks require a more systematic analysis and deeper understanding of their advantages and drawbacks compared with desktop monitors. While previous work has mostly addressed search, visualization and sense-making tasks, we have designed an abstract classification task that involves explicit data manipulation. Based on our observations of real uses of a wall display, this task represents a large category of applications. We report on a controlled experiment that uses this task to compare physical navigation in front of a wall-size display with virtual navigation using panand-zoom on the desktop. Our main finding is a robust interaction effect between display type and task difficulty: while the desktop can be faster than the wall for simple tasks, the wall gains a sizable advantage as the task becomes more difficult. A follow-up study shows that other desktop techniques (overview+detail, lens) do not perform better than pan-andzoom and are therefore slower than the wall for difficult tasks.

International audienceWall-sized displays support small groups of users working together on large amounts of data. Observational studies of such settings have shown that users adopt a range of collaboration styles, from loosely to closely coupled. Shared interaction techniques, in which multiple users perform a command collaboratively, have also been introduced to support co-located collaborative work. In this paper, we operational-ize five collaborative situations with increasing levels of coupling , and test the effects of providing shared interaction support for a data manipulation task in each situation. The results show the benefits of shared interaction for close collaboration: it encourages collaborative manipulation, it is more efficient and preferred by users, and it reduces physical navigation and fatigue. We also identify the time costs caused by disruption and communication in loose collaboration and analyze the trade-offs between parallelization and close collaboration. These findings inform the design of shared interaction techniques to support collaboration on wall-sized displays