Spotlight: Directing Users' Attention on Large Displays

Azam Khan, Justin Matejka, George Fitzmaurice, Gordon Kurtenbach

January 2005 · Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)

Abstract

We describe a new interaction technique, called a spotlight, for directing the visual attention of an audience when viewing data or presentations on large wall-sized displays. A spotlight is simply a region of the display where the contents are displayed normally while the remainder of the display is somewhat darkened. In this paper we define the behavior of spotlights, show unique affordances of the technique, and discuss design characteristics. We also report on experiments that show the benefit of using the spotlight a large display and standard desktop configuration. Our results suggest that the spotlight is preferred over the standard cursor and outperforms it by a factor of 3.4 on a wall-sized display.

DOI PDF

Figures

Figure 1. The Spotlight technique on a large wall-sized display (enhanced image).

Figure 2. Components: The spotlight consists of a darkened exterior region, a fully transparent inner region, and a cursor.

Figure 3. Simplified State Transition Diagram.

Figure 4. Searchlight Mode: A beam is drawn from the center of the display to the spotlight to further assist the user in quickly acquiring the target.

Figure 5. Wall-sized Display Hardware Configuration. Total screen size is 648 sq. ft. (72 ft. by 9 ft.).

Figure 6. Experimental set-up. Three field-of-view angles were tested: 108°, 180°, and 240°.

Figure 7. Close-up of sample trial for Cursor, Spotlight, and Searchlight conditions (left to right). Note that the cursor is present in all techniques.

Figure 8. Experiment Set-up. Cursor, Spotlight, and Searchlight Conditions (Top to Bottom).

Figure 9. Mean performance on large display.

Figure 10. Mean performance on standard 21” monitor.

Figure 11. Subjective preference for both the wall-sized display and the desktop display when asked if they liked a given technique.

Figure 12. Spotlight Designs (a) Multi-light. (b) Circular. (c) Curtain. (d) Cone-light. (e) Searchlight. (f) Shape-light. (g) Multiple Searchlights. (h) Multiple Cone-lights. (i) Elliptical Shape-sea

BibTeX

@inproceedings{10.1145/1054972.1055082,
 abstract = {We describe a new interaction technique, called a spotlight, for directing the visual attention of an audience when viewing data or presentations on large wall-sized displays. A spotlight is simply a region of the display where the contents are displayed normally while the remainder of the display is somewhat darkened. In this paper we define the behavior of spotlights, show unique affordances of the technique, and discuss design characteristics. We also report on experiments that show the benefit of using the spotlight a large display and standard desktop configuration. Our results suggest that the spotlight is preferred over the standard cursor and outperforms it by a factor of 3.4 on a wall-sized display.},
 address = {New York, NY, USA},
 author = {Khan, Azam and Matejka, Justin and Fitzmaurice, George and Kurtenbach, Gordon},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
 doi = {10.1145/1054972.1055082},
 isbn = {1581139985},
 keywords = {user study, field of view, large displays, attention},
 location = {Portland, Oregon, USA},
 numpages = {8},
 pages = {791–798},
 publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
 series = {CHI '05},
 title = {Spotlight: Directing Users' Attention on Large Displays},
 url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/1054972.1055082},
 year = {2005}
}