Two primary types of multiplayer gaming have emerged over the years. The first type involves co-located players on a shared display, and typically caps at four players. The second type of gaming provides a single display for each player. This type scales well beyond four players, but places no requirement on co-location. This paper will attempt to combine the best of both worlds via high-resolution, highly-multiplayer gaming. Over the past few years, there has been a rise in the number of extremely high-resolution, tiled displays. These displays provide an enormous amount of screen space to work with. This space was used to allow twelve co-located players to play a game together. This study accomplishes three things: we designed and built PyBomber, a high-resolution and highly multiplayer game for up to twelve players; secondly, user trials were conducted to see whether this type of gaming is enjoyable as well as to learn what sorts of social interactions take place amongst so many players; lastly, the lessons learned were generalized into design criteria for future high-resolution games. Results show that with more people, much more of the time during a game was filled with vocal interactions between players. There were also more physical movements in the larger games. Over the course of this study, we learned that good high-resolution games will: decide between a singular gameplay area and split views, use the physical space in front of the display, provide feedback that is localized to each player, and utilize input devices appropriately. / Master of Science

Tiling multiple monitors to increase the amount of screen space has become an area of great interest to researchers. While previous research has shown user performance benefits when tiling multiple monitors, little research has analyzed whether much larger high-resolution displays result in better user performance. The work in this paper evaluates user performance on an even larger, twenty-four monitor, high-resolution (96 DPI), high pixel-count (approximately 32 million pixels) display for single-users in both flat and curved forms. The first experiment compares user performance time, accuracy, and mental workload on multi-scale geospatial search, route tracing, and comparison tasks across one, twelve (4x3), and twenty-four (8x3) tiled monitor configurations. Using the same tasks, we evaluated conditions that uniformly curve the twelve and twenty-four monitor displays. Results show that, depending on the task, larger viewport sizes improve performance time with less user frustration. Findings also reveal that curving large displays improves performance time as users interacted with less strenuous physical navigation on the curved conditions. A second study sought to understand why curving the display, effectively bringing all pixels into visible range, improved performance so as to provide guidelines for using such large displays. The study tested for region biases, performance gaps in comparing virtually distant objects, and degree of detail of user insights while measuring the physical navigation required. Results clearly show that significantly less movement is required when physically navigating the curved display. Performance measures reveal that users favor the left regions of the flat display, while there appears to be no region bias on the curved display. Furthermore, user performance time increased as the virtual distance between objects increased, and there is a tradeoff in insight detail between the two forms. In conclusion, larger, high-resolution displays improve user performance, and curving such displays further improves performance, removing any biases towards regions of the display, potentially reducing the performance drop of virtually far apart objects, reducing the amount of physical navigation necessary, and enabling more detailed insights. Based on these findings, one should always curve multiple monitor displays for single users, and if space is an issue, start curving once the display reaches four or five monitors wide. / Master of Science

The decreasing price of displays has enabled exploration of ever-larger high-resolution displays. Previous research has shown that as the display grows larger, users prefer to physically navigate, which has proven benefits. However, increasing the display size so radically creates a new difficulty in interaction. The paradigm has changed from sitting at a desktop computer to taking users' physical navigation into account and designing more mobile interactions. Currently, when users move, they change the scale at which they are viewing information without changing the interaction scale. This is a problem because tasks change at different levels of visual scale. Mulitscale interaction aims to exploit users’ movement by linking it to interaction, changing the interaction scale depending on users’ distance from the display. This work accomplishes three things: first, we define the design space of multiscale interaction; secondly, through a case study, we explore the design issues for a specific area of the design space; lastly, we evaluate one application through a user study that compares it to two other interaction types. We wanted to know, do users in fact benefit from the linkage of physical navigation with interaction? Results show a trend of a natural link between user distance and interaction scale, even with the other techniques that did not enforce this link. In addition, multiscale interaction benefits from the link by having more consistent performance. They also show that while participants using multiscale interaction tend to move more, they benefit from this additional movement, unlike with the other interaction types. / Master of Science

As increasingly large displays are integrated into personal workspaces, mouse-based interaction becomes more problematic. Users must repeatedly "clutch" the mouse for long distance movements [61]. The visibility of the cursor is also problematic in large screens, since the percentage of the screen space that the cursor takes from the whole display gets smaller. We test multi-scale approaches to mouse interaction that utilize dynamic speed and size techniques to grow the cursor larger and faster for long movements. Using Fitts' Law methods, we experimentally compare different implementations to optimize the mouse design for large displays and to test how they scale to large displays. We also compare them to techniques that integrate absolute pointing with head tracking. Results indicate that with some implementation level modifications the mouse device can scale well up to even a 100 megapixel display with lower mean movement times as compared to integrating absolute pointing techniques to mouse input while maintaining fast performance of the typical mouse configuration on small screens for short distance movements. Designs that have multiple acceleration levels and 4x maximum acceleration reduced average number of clutching to less than one per task in a 100 megapixel display. Dynamic size cursors statistically improve pointing performance. Results also indicated that dynamic speed transitions should be as smooth as possible without steps of more than 2x increase in speed. / Master of Science