E-conic

Abstract

Multi-display environments compose displays that can be at different locations from and different angles to the user; as a result, it can become very difficult to manage windows, read text, and manipulate objects. We investigate the idea of perspective as a way to solve these problems in multi-display environments. We first identify basic display and control factors that are affected by perspective, such as visibility, fracture, and sharing. We then present the design and implementation of E-conic, a multi-display multi-user environment that uses location data about displays and users to dynamically correct perspective. We carried out a controlled experiment to test the benefits of perspective correction in basic interaction tasks like targeting, steering, aligning, pattern-matching and reading. Our results show that perspective correction significantly and substantially improves user performance in all these tasks.