Looking behind bezels

Rodrigo A. de Almeida, Clément Pillias, Emmanuel Pietriga, Pierre Cubaud
2012 Proceedings of the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces - AVI '12  
1) (2) (3) Figure 1 : The grid formed by monitor bezels on wall displays is often compared to a french window. We designed two interaction techniques that transform that grid into an actual french window. On the map, (1) the Yucatán peninsula (white circle) is partially hidden by bezels. (2) With one of the techniques, GridScape, users can reveal that part of the map simply by slanting their body or moving slightly to the right. (3) Moving further right, the entire eastern cost of Mexico can be
more » ... shown without any bezel occlusion. ABSTRACT Using tiled monitors to build wall-sized displays has multiple advantages: higher pixel density, simpler setup and easier calibration. However, the resulting display walls suffer from the visual discontinuity caused by the bezels that frame each monitor. To avoid introducing distortion, the image has to be rendered as if some pixels were drawn behind the bezels. In turn, this raises the issue that a non-negligible part of the rendered image, that might contain important information, is visually occluded. We propose to draw upon the analogy to french windows that is often used to describe this approach, and make the display really behave as if the visualization were observed through a french window. We present and evaluate two interaction techniques that let users reveal content hidden behind bezels. ePan enables users to offset the entire image through explicit touch gestures. GridScape adopts a more implicit approach: it makes the grid formed by bezels act like a true french window using head tracking to simulate motion parallax, adapting to users' physical movements in front of the display. The two techniques work for both single-and multiple-user contexts.
doi:10.1145/2254556.2254581 dblp:conf/avi/AlmeidaPPC12 fatcat:fjsxxznrz5gxdf5lhc3pvjvznq