Exploring interaction strategies with Wall-screen: a new dual-display device for managing collections of web pages

Wall-screen is a heterogeneous dual-headed display combining (1) a wall-size augmented surface to display peripheral information and (2) a common screen to focus on specific tasks. Wall-screen has been used for tasks related to the management of collections of web pages ranging from authoring new web pages to browsing, organizing or retrieving pages from existing collections. This specific application is used to illustrate the benefits of Wall-screen device but we believe that our model is generic enough to be used in many other areas where (1) a user needs to shift from his main focus to related peripheral information relatively frequently, (2) peripheral information might be organized, discussed, and shared among several users and (3) focus and periphery can be divided into two independent spaces with no additional cognitive load for the user. In this paper we present Wall-screen basics, we propose three different design strategies that determine: (1) how to manipulate information on the wall and (2) how to organize the space between the two display devices. Further we present preliminary evaluation and lessons learned.