Focus+Context Screens: A Study and Evaluation
David Mitchell
Department of Computer Science
University of Canterbury
Abstract
Display and manipulation of large documents on a standard display has long been a difficult problem. In this report we extend the work of Baudisch in Focus+Context screens. These screens combine a large low resolution display with a standard high resolution display to give a cost effective, large display. This report describes the physical and software implementation of our own focus+context screen. An ecological study is presented that finds focus+context screens have many potential areas of application. Two formal evaluations comparing the screen to other focus+context solutions and investigating the types of task the screen is best suited to. We find that the focus+context screen provides increased performance for tasks at a large scale, especially on documents the user is familiar with, and that users tend to enjoy using the focus+context screen.
