Effects of Tiled High-Resolution Display on Basic Visualization and Navigation Tasks Robert Ball and Chris North Center for Human-Computer Interaction Department of Computer Science Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg, Virginia 24061 ABSTRACT Large high-resolution screens are becoming increasingly available and less expensive. This creates potential advantages for data visualization in that more dense data and fine details are viewable at once. Also, less navigation may be needed to see more data. However, little work has been done to determine the effectiveness of large high- resolution displays, especially for basic low-level data visualization and navigation tasks. This paper describes an exploratory study on the effects of a large tiled display with a resolution of 3840x3072 as compared to two smaller displays (1560x2048 and 1280x1024). We conclude that, with finely detailed data, higher resolution displays that use physical navigation significantly outperform smaller displays that use pan and zoom navigation. Qualitatively, we also conclude that use of the larger display is less stressful and creates a better sense of confidence than the smaller displays. Author Keywords High-resolution display, information visualization. ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation: Miscellaneous. INTRODUCTION Large high-resolution displays, with greater numbers of pixels, have the potential to increase the quantity and granularity of displayed information. In this paper, we define resolution as the total number of pixels in the display. Related dimensions are the physical size of the display, and the pixel density of the display. Together, size and density define total resolution. While it is possible to increase resolution by using high-density display technologies (such as IBM’s Big Bertha), here we focus on increasing resolution by tiling displays into larger sizes (e.g. Figure 1). This is distinct from large projected displays that increase size, but decrease density, with no net change to resolution. Naively, one might expect that more pixels is always better, particularly in data visualization where the goal is to enable users to absorb large amounts of information quickly. However, it is not clearly evident if increased resolution would be beneficial, or to what extent. There is limited empirical evidence on interactive high-resolution visualization. One counter-argument is the fundamental perceptual and physical limitations of humans, such as the relatively small focal area of the human eye [6]. [2][4] show advantages of higher resolutions for standard high- level desktop applications tasks, using up to 3 tiled screens. Studies such as [5] show advantages of large size, but low resolution. [1] shows visualization advantages of a mixed density display that implements focus+context by combining a small and large size display, both at low resolution. This leads to open questions about the value of high resolution from a basic perceptual and navigation point of view. Figure 1: The nine-monitor tiled configuration. The total resolution is 3840x3072 (11,796,480 pixels). The fundamental issues are summarized in Table 1. The critical tradeoff revolves around data access. Low- resolution display offers a smaller view-port into the data space. Hence, it provides less simultaneously visible data items or less data detail, and requires more virtual navigation of the view-port to access remaining hidden data Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CHI 2005, April 2–7, 2004, Portland, Oregon, USA. ACM 1-59593-002-7/05/0004.