Faculty fellow aims to tap power of display walls to enhance creativity

Computer science professor Brian Bailey is interested in creativity and collaboration. How can people work more effectively together on creative projects, whether they're designing a magazine, a website, a building, a subdivision, a video game, a landscape, software, or a new widget? One constraint designers face, particularly when attempting to collaborate, is a lack of screen real estate. Desktop displays just don't offer enough workspace for sketching, annotating, and navigating large-scale designs. In order to maximize both creativity and collaboration, designers "need to break out of the confines of the small, individual computer screen," Bailey says. Large display systems can provide ample space, but how can designers effectively interact with such a vast canvas? Standing at a large screen for long periods of time, stretching and stooping to reach the far corners, would be tiring for most people and downright impossible for some. "It changes the ergonomics of the interaction experience," Bailey says. In order to use large displays for sustained periods of time, designers need a more practical, comfortable way to interact with the screens. People need a way to "marry the advantages of the small screen with the advantages of the big display wall," Bailey says. His proposed solution tethers a high-resolution tablet to a lower-resolution large screen. The tablet functions as a "focus screen" that allows a designer to interact closely with the work, sketching details and making edits, for example. The larger display screen, the "context screen," allows the designer and other collaborators to see multiple ideas or iterations at one time, making comparisons and seeing information in a larger context. The system allows multiple people to contribute ideas to the large design space -- and they can easily move any idea back to their tablet space to annotate and edit one another's work in a process called "reinterpretation." The entire team can juxtapose edits, make comparisons, and share ideas. The system is network-based to allow collaborators to easily exit and re-enter collaborative sessions. As an NCSA/UIUC Faculty Fellow, Bailey has been able to test his system using NCSA's tiled display wall, a 12-foot by 9-foot system that provides a 4,096-by-3,840-pixel display surface. The system is driven by a Linux cluster and uses 20 projectors, which rear-project onto a single screen. NCSA visualization experts Dave Semeraro and Paul Raijlich provided support and advice, and the fellowship also funded the work of Bailey's graduate student, Damon Cook. Designers have been invited to work with the system, enabling Bailey to gauge its usability and utility and to observe how different people use the tool. As the project continues, Bailey aims to gain deeper understanding of how people use large displays in the design process and to extract general principles of system interaction that can be applied to different domains. "The goal is to allow people to produce higher quality designs in less time by enhancing their collective creativity," Bailey says.