INVENTOR THROWS CURVE AT SCREENS TO MAKE THEM MORE USER-FRIENDLY
Imagine if your computer screen curved around your head, immersing you in information, images and sounds. Taking a cue from the film industry, Gary Starkweather had a hunch that enlarging and bending the screen would make computers much more natural to use.
``I'd never seen moviegoers get really thrilled on small screens,'' he said. ``It becomes a much more compelling experience at an IMAX theater. I thought `What if we had a computer display that looked more like a Cinerama?' ''
That hunch has led to a two-year project at Microsoft, where Starkweather -- who invented the laser printer at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center and won an Academy Award for his work on film scanning -- is developing a new kind of computer display.
Starkweather has found that using a semicircular monitor three times as wide as the standard one can improve people's productivity, allowing them to take advantage of their peripheral vision and to spend less time opening and closing different windows.
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News source: Silicon Valley
