Stick it on the Wall: A Metaphor for Interaction with Large Displays

When people need to work with a large collection of information all together, they often put it on a wall, where it is easy to view, annotate, and organize. We have adopted “stick it on the wall” as a metaphor to structure a system and a user interface for interacting with a large-format high-resolution display. This paper describes the user interface and key components of the system design. The user interface is based on pen input, handwriting recognition, and a pop-up menu system called FlowMenu. We designed and constructed a large (~9 megapixel) wall-mounted, back-projected 6' x 4' display with a resolution of 64 dpi. We have built a toolkit to implement the user interface and to create a multilayer windowing system to display images, sketches, 3D models, and fully active remote desktops and applications. The system uses OpenGL as the primary rendering API, driving a high performance distributed graphics system.