Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Zooming in on Small Displays (19 Oct 2004) According to Horvitz, ZoneZoom is an example of a class of designs he calls "foveating displays," alluding to the way we use our eyes to build up visual images of the world. He said that psychologists have shown that people inspect the world via the keyhole of the fovea, a relatively small region of our retinas that provides high resolution views of a portion of the visual field. Scientists believe that our iconic visual memory pieces together multiple views to provide us with the impression that we are seeing much more than we actually are seeing. "The idea behind foveating displays is to expand the perceived size of displays by feeding fluid visual sequences to users' visual working memory, such as zoom-outs during jumps among different regions," said Horvitz. With ZoneZoom the user gets a feeling of flying over the information space, zooming in for a close look, flying back out to get the larger picture and identify where they want to go next, and then zooming in to a new location. While viewing a Web page, map, or some photos, the hope is that your mind will forget that your eyes are looking at a teeny, tiny display. Article URL: http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=1034 Read 136 more articles from Microsoft sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: E-Government: No website is better than a bad one     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy