Honey, I shrunk the desk
"If I shrunk your desk to the size of a computer screen, you wouldn't like it very much," says Gary Starkweather, Senior Researcher with the Hardware Devices group at Microsoft Research.

Imagine having a 17-inch desk—you'd have to put the phone on the floor to use the keyboard, balance your coffee cup in your lap, and rest your feet on piles of paper. The same thing happens on a computer display—you're constantly switching between e-mail, word documents, the Net and Excel spreadsheets. Starkweather says, "Wouldn't it be nice to have a display that was much bigger so you wouldn't have to keep clicking things away?"

He believes that one day we will have wide displays that are integrated into our lives like wallpaper—you might think about it as you're putting it up, but after that you can forget about it and enjoy the view.

High cost equals low interest
What's stopping this from happening now? No one has come up with a reasonably priced flat-panel display. "If I went home to my wife and said I want an HDTV that costs $15,000, she might complain. If it was $500 it would be much less of a question," says Starkweather.

Feeding a wall-sized display can be just as challenging as building it, according to Turner Whitted, another member of the Hardware Devices group. First, the bandwidth required to route images into and within the display requires some creative design. A 108 x 72-inch wall-sized display at 300 dpi would have a resolution of 32,400 x 21,600. The image transfer rate would exceed 50 giga-pixels per second—an attention getting number. Within the display itself, the staggering number of individual light reflectors or emitters required and problems with connecting and powering very flat devices pose another challenge.

Although there are far more choices today in display technology, each technology has a drawback. Front projection displays have the problem of shadows cast by the user, while rear projection displays require floor space—one of our most precious resources. LCDs, though a mature technology, are produced by an inherently expensive manufacturing process. Some of these problems have been addressed in the lab, but the costs of manufacturing displays for a consumer market have yet to be solved.

Fortunately Starkweather is no stranger to challenges, having invented the laser printer in spite of being told, "no one would want that." Starkweather and his co-worker, Mike Sinclair, are exploring ways to build low-cost miniature display cubes that could be tiled together to form any size display. The technology behind this is called MicroElectoMechanical Systems, or MEMS.

Teeny, tiny mirrors
MEMS makes it possible to build micro-scaled devices that integrate electrical and mechanical components. Though Sinclair says he's still learning the technology, he's already displaying videos of tiny actuators and gears that he's built—devices not much bigger than a human hair. He's planning to build a mirror array that will be as big as your thumb and contain about 40,000 mirrors. Each mirror will have its own tiny motor, and each motor will have a piece of memory. If the memory says it's a one, the mirror will flip one way, if the memory says it's a zero, the mirror will flip the other way. The light shining on the mirrors will squirt off the lens and illuminate an area about one-inch square, creating a pixel. The mirrors flip very fast—like crazy miniature cards in a baseball score display—deflecting quite a bit of light in the process. Combine that with red, blue and green lasers and you have infinite resolution. The resulting display could be low-cost, and adaptable to any size by tiling the small devices together.

Real-world use
Microsoft pays a lot of attention to the user when they design products. "If you build it, they will come," is a motto sure to get any company into trouble. Microsoft began instituting user studies a long time ago, to assure that customers would want to show up when the product was built. According to Mary Czerwinski, a researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interactions research group, Microsoft is "one of the best in the world" at considering the user.

She'll be running user studies on a wide-aspect projection display while the Hardware Device team continues to experiment with alternate ways to build a better display. Her goal is to find out how users experience a display that offers a lot of room to spread out—will they use the periphery of the display, and if so, how? Her research on other projects, particularly studies on how interruptions affect workflow, is perfectly tied to wide displays.

Czerwinski says that a wide display will be more like the real world than a tiny little box in front of you, because people remember where things are spatially. "We're not great at knowing where in the pile that paper is, but we know which pile it is."

Applications or documents stored as thumbnails in a 3D environment and placed on virtual floors, walls and ceilings, are more readily found again than if they'd been dragged into a Favorites or My Document folder. Those folders all look alike and are in the same place, which doesn't allow the user to access them spatially—a method more natural in the real world. You can probably remember that last night you threw your socks on the bathroom floor, your jeans next to the bed, and your glasses on the edge of the tub—but remembering which folder you dragged your tax return to might prove more difficult. A wide display could accommodate a 2D or 3D visual environment that would aid in retrieving "lost" documents.

Starkweather is a visionary who imagines the future, and the future for wide-displays looks good. Even if today's generation can't imagine the need to view several things at once, the next generation can't wait until it gets here. Czerwinski says that her teenage subjects can have four to eight Instant Messages open and active while successfully completing their homework assignments.

One of the sure things in life is change. "Once people didn't believe that there was a future in copiers, because carbon paper was cheaper. But what they didn't think about was that a copy made on carbon paper had to be made at the point of creation of the document, whereas a copy could be made at any time in the life of the document," says Starkweather. His experiments in cutting-edge displays pave the way for a new way of viewing our world.