Evaluation of viewport size and curvature of large, high-resolution displays

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. We compared 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. We also compare user performance time in conditions that uniformly curve the twelve and twenty-four monitor displays. Results show that curving displays decreases user performance time, and we observed less strenuous physical navigation on the curved conditions. Depending on the task, the larger viewport sizes also improve performance time, and user frustration is significantly less with the larger displays than with one monitor.