Peephole Displays

benh57 writes "A student at Berkeley has come up with a novel approach for navigating small handheld displays. In effect the display is a "peephole" into a much larger information area. You see different parts of the display by moving the handheld around - no more tiny scrollbars. Check out the DiVX movies to see it in action. It even works in 3D!"

Comments

X windows virtual screens

[etymxris]

Hasn't this been done before? In X, if the virtual resolution is larger than the screen resolution, you use the mouse to move around. How is this much different?

Re:X windows virtual screens

[Anonymous Coward]

Hasn't this been done before? In X, if the virtual resolution is larger than the screen resolution, you use the mouse to move around. How is this much different?

It isn't much different. Isn't it funny how innovative and useful ideas stem so naturally from free ideas in the public domain? Now if Microsoft or Palm had the patent on scrolling virtual windows we may never have seen this new implementation at all (not to mention how difficult it would be to play some RTS games).

Place your bets now....

[caluml]

VIDEOS To play DivX video, get a free decoder from divx.com. You can play DivX videos on Linux, MacOS, or Windows.

* video demonstration for CHI 2003, 16 Dec 2002 (5m 52s)
o high quality: AVI (72 Mb, DivX)
o medium quality: AVI (33 Mb, DivX)
o low quality: AVI (16 Mb, DivX)
* video figure for CHI 2003, 23 Sep 2002 (2m 35s)
o AVI (13.8 Mb)
o QuickTime (27.6 Mb)
* submitted to UIST 2002, Apr 2002 (3m 31 s)
o AVI (46 Mb, MPEG4.2)
o QuickTime (50 Mb, MJPEG)
o DivX (45 Mb)



How long will their server last? ;o)

What we really need is...

[ewanrg]

I think this is a very innovative way to make the UI help get around the physical limitations of the device.

But what we REALLY need are answers to those physical limitations. I have a lot more hope for a foldable display in the long term than in ways to try to make a big picture/UI fit on a small screen.

Not knocking what is an excellant piece of work, but sometimes a great solution to a problem blocks better solutions.

Just my .02 worth...

Re:Nice concept

[All Names Have Been]

Imagine a bus rounding a corner and the text compensating by scrolling.

Of course the answer to this is to have the gyros - but the scrolling is toggled on/off via a button on the side. Press it, you can scroll by moving your device. Release the button, and the display is locked in place. Now you can read on the bus, in bed, etc.

Ok.

[FreeLinux]

I'll admit that it is terribly cool looking, though the concept is not entirely new. However, the practicality of it seems rather unlikely.

If you have to lug around a huge backpack of support gear, why not just carry a larger display, such as Apple's 17" laptop or a future roll-up screen. Now, I know everyone will jump on me and say that they will reduce the size of the support gear but, it is still going to be impractical.

In order to use this thing you must move around a fair bit. Imagine a subway train full of people gyrating with their PDAs. It will look like a bunch of DDR freaks on mescalin.

I think a much better solution would be to simple use a little track ball on the the bottom of the PDA to scroll around screen. but, that's not new technology at all.

Re:Ok.

[Minna Kirai]

If you have to lug around a huge backpack of support gear

Give him a break! He's a lone student, trying to produce a useful prototype of the HCI loop. The proposal isn't for a consumer level product.

If the demonstration is successful, then a PDA manufacturer could look into engineering the hardware down into a single handheld device, but first they've got to see the concept in action.

Re:Nice concept

[Minna Kirai]

Imagine a bus rounding a corner and the text compensating by scrolling.

That could be a beneficial effect! Many people have difficulty reading small text on a moving vehicle, because the page constantly bounces around.

Possibly, this system could act as an "image stabilizer" for the text- causing the text to follow a smoother path than your actual bouncing hand.

Of course, whether or not this can be helpful depends on many factors- Does the screen have 10 millisecond updates? Does your head bounce more or less than your hand? (If they're in sync already, then you're fine.)

And how well does the inertial tracking system distinguish the gross movements of the bus from your localized jittering? (You wouldn't want to leave the POV behind you at the station where you boarded!)

Re:Nice concept

[GothChip]

Just add a thumb button on the side which just turns the scrolling on when you want to use.

Deckchairs on the Titanic

[Anonymous Coward]

I really am supportive of this kind of innovation, but when it comes to any device with a tiny screen, I just think it's a case of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. There's only so much information you can present, and with only so much usability, on such a small device. Until we have something really advanced, like holographic screens that are much larger than their physical device, we won't be able to escape this problem.

Re:Mirror of the videos

[umthie10]

Why don't we use one of those filesharing networks to mirror sites? Then hopefully the downloading situation could get better as more people grabbed it.

"Advantages" don't seem that great

[ianscot]

The only problem with scroll bars mentioned is:

current display technology constrains the size of the display to be no larger than the physical size of the device.

Are we that worried about the screen real estate? Enough to break the user interface continuity from, say, your computer to your PDA for something as basic as scrolling? The "several advantages" of doing so seem pretty insubstantial:

Scrolling becomes direct and intuitive; one can move to a new region of the space just as fast as one can move the device.
Arrows and a scroll bar are going to be more "intuitive" than any "move the PDA and it scrolls" approach, I'm betting. Remember seeing your grandma getting to the edge of her mousepad, and not knowing how to pick up the mouse to "hop" it and scroll a little farther? How intuitive will this be by comparison?

It eliminates the feedback loop of normal scrolling (press "Down", read, press "Down", read, etc.) and replaces it with a single movement.
People don't read text as it scrolls. Watch that DVD you have of Star Wars, Episode I -- at 4x speed -- and read the yellow text at the start. Does that work?

It replaces discrete control with continuous control, massively increasing the bandwidth of information communicated between user and device.
Is this one just filler? Describe the "massive" increase.

It frees the hand used to operate the device, permitting scrolling and interaction at the same time.
People don't read and scroll at one time, and here's guessing they won't poke at a moving target of a button. What would they be doing, dragging a mask over the edge of an image in photoshop -- on their PDA? While moving the "peephole" window?

It yields some of the advantages of two-handed interfaces for free: the non-dominant hand gives coarse positioning information, while the dominant hand does specific pointing and manipulation.
You can actually see this one -- except the converse statement would be that it requires two hands to do what one could do before.

If it's really just screen real estate, a trackball or little direction pad like a gameboy has makes more sense, with some sort of tiny but clear visual clue -- a border or something -- that you could scroll in one direction or another. But we're all used to scroll bars by now, we really are, and even something as simple as that would be jarring for lots of people.

Maybe there are some new ways to program for this model, to take advantage of those, uh, advantages, but for the stuff we do now it'd be clumsier.