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Objective: Existing reports suggest that males significantly outperform females in navigating 3-D virtual environments. Although researchers have recognized that this may be attributable to males and females possessing different spatial abilities, most work has attempted to reduce the gender gap by providing more training for females. In this paper, we explore using large displays to narrow the gender gap within these tasks.Background: While evaluating various interaction techniques, we found that large displays affording wider fields of view seemed to improve virtual navigation performance in general and, additionally, to narrow the gender gap that existed on standard desktop displays.Method: We conducted two experiments (32 and 22 participants) exploring the individual contributions of display and geometric fields of view to the observed effects as well as isolating factors explaining performance increases seen on the large displays.Results: We show that wider fields of view on large displays not only increase performance of all users on average but also benefit females to such a degree as to allow them to perform as well as males do. We further demonstrate that these benefits can be attributed to better optical flow cues offered by the large displays.Conclusion: These findings provide a significant contribution, including recommendations for the improved presentation of 3-D environments, backed by empirical data demonstrating performance benefits during navigation tasks. APPLICATION. Results can be used to design systems that narrow the gender gap in domains such as teleoperation and virtual environments for entertainment, virtual training, or information visualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Notification systems attempt to deliver current, important information to the computer screen in an efficient and effective manner. All notification systems require that the user attends to them to at least some degree if they are to succeed. Examples of notification systems include instant messaging systems, system and user status updates, email alerts and news and stock tickers. The benefits of notification systems are numerous, including rapid availability of important information, access to nearly instantaneous communication and heightened awareness of the availability of personal contacts. While the popularity of these systems has skyrocketed in recent years, the effects of incoming notifications on ongoing computing tasks have been relatively unexplored. The investigation of the costs, benefits and the optimal display of instant messages and all notifications in the context of desktop or mobile computing tasks falls in the general arena of psychological research on alerting and disruptions, but also requires research contributions from design, computer science and information visualization. To date, much of the psychological research on interruption leverages theoretical task constructions. In this special issue, we focus on the nature of interruptions such as messaging while computing and how to optimize the user experience. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Presents a brief historical overview of research in individual differences in the context of virtual environments. Notion of structure in the perception of individual users of an information system; Role of individuals' abilities in recognizing and using such structures; Recurring themes of studies pertaining to individuals' use of such structures.

Creativity support tools is a research topic with high risk but potentially very high payoff. The goal is to develop improved software and user interfaces that empower users to be not only more productive but also more innovative. Potential users include software and other engineers, diverse scientists, product and graphic designers, architects, educators, students, and many others. Enhanced interfaces could enable more effective searching of intellectual resources, improved collaboration among teams, and more rapid discovery processes. These advanced interfaces should also provide potent support in hypothesis formation, speedier evaluation of alternatives, improved understanding through visualization, and better dissemination of results. For creative endeavors that require composition of novel artifacts (e.g., computer programs, scientific papers, engineering diagrams, symphonies, artwork), enhanced interfaces could facilitate exploration of alternatives, prevent unproductive choices, and enable easy backtracking. This U.S. National Science Foundation sponsored workshop brought together 25 research leaders and graduate students to share experiences, identify opportunities, and formulate research challenges. Two key outcomes emerged: (a) encouragement to evaluate creativity support tools through multidimensional in-depth longitudinal case studies and (b) formulation of 12 principles for design of creativity support tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue turns the spotlight on business intelligence (BI) as an area of inquiry and explores beyond the current standard practices. The articles in the issue describe the processes that practitioners currently follow in this area and how new BI techniques and capabilities will help users understand and act on widely disparate types of data. The articles also report on how organizations make decisions around datasets, what purposes visualizations are used for, and what different representations people use to show and explore data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Buxton and Myers (1986) compared a specialized document navigation device and a scrollbar. Their device tracked finger movements along two touch-sensitive areas: one for absolute movement and one for relative movement. They found that their system was faster when navigating a 5-page document. We identified finger-tracking issues with the Buxton and Myers device for larger documents (100 pages) and developed an alternative device employing a range sensor and rotary encoder to track finger movement. We ran a new experiment comparing the traditional scrollbar, the Buxton and Myers design, and our new design. Both the Buxton and Myers design and our new design were poorly received by users compared to the scrollbar. Our results indicate that in a large document, factors beyond finger tracking accuracy influence the performance of a device providing absolute movement. From these results, we identify possible improvements necessary to implement effective and practical absolute navigation devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have begun to explore tools that allow multiple users to collaborate across multiple devices in collocated environments. These tools often allow users to simultaneously place and interact with information on shared displays. Unfortunately, there is a lack of experimental tasks to evaluate the effectiveness of these tools for information coordination in such scenarios. In this article, we introduce job-shop scheduling as a task that could be used to evaluate systems and interactions within computer-supported collaboration environments. We describe properties that make the task useful, as well as evaluation measures that may be used. We also present two experiments as case studies to illustrate the breadth of scenarios in which this task may be applied. The first experiment shows the differences when users interact with different communicative gesturing schemes, while the second demonstrates the benefits of shared visual information on large displays. We close by discussing the general applicability of the tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]