Focus Plus Context Screens:
    Displays for Users Working with Large Visual Documents

Patrick Baudisch, PARC
   patrick.baudisch@acm.org

Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Stanford University March 8, 2002

In this talk, I will present Focus plus context screens. Focus plus context screens are wall-size low-resolution displays with an embedded high-resolution display region. Image content is displayed such that the scaling of the display content is preserved, while its resolution varies according to which display region it is displayed in. Focus plus context screens allow users to view details of a document up close, while simultaneously seeing peripheral parts of the document in lower resolution. I will present our prototype that seamlessly integrates an LCD with a projection screen, demonstrate four application scenarios, and report the results of an experimental comparison with competing visualization techniques.

Patrick Baudisch is a research scientist at Xerox PARC. His research interests include user interface design, information visualization, and focus plus context screens. While at GMD-IPSI, Baudisch was a member of the digital libraries group. His dissertation is in the area of dynamic information filtering and resulted in the TV recommendation systems TV Scout. Baudisch worked as a guest researcher at the GroupLens project at the University on Minnesota. Baudisch holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany.

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