Sidebar: Virtual Desktops Get Bigger

Computerworld - The paperless office has been a favorite vendor mantra for years, but printers remain a lucrative business. The problem with moving off paper, however, is not the ability to create and share documents electronically, but the size of the human/machine interface -- the monitor.
"People will get rid of paper once they find it easier to use the screen instead of going to the printer," says Gartner Inc. analyst Martin Reynolds. That's not the case today.
The computer screen workspace is euphemistically referred to as the "desktop," but in reality it's anything but. The fact is, most people can't work comfortably in the confines of a space the size of a single sheet of paper. Clicking back and forth between windows containing views and partial views of documents, databases, spreadsheets and graphics needed to create a report just doesn't cut it. So in practice, that 17-in. desktop screen typically sits atop a 9-ft.-diagonal physical desktop that's loaded with printouts related to the project on which the user is currently working.
Expanding the Virtual Desktop
By 2008, however, developments in three technology areas could start to change all that. First, LCD monitors are coming down in price, making it cost-effective to build larger, higher-resolution displays. Microsoft Research's hardware devices group, meanwhile, is working on developing large-scale monitors that use lasers and minute mirrors.
Second, the next generation of Windows, slated for release in 2006, will most likely support larger single monitors, or multiple smaller monitors.
Finally, the Palo Alto Research Center in California is working on a new user interface that it says will make the virtual desktop as useful as the physical desktop. It will reflect the way people actually work, rather than making people adapt their workstyles to a computer's quirks.
"Computers are getting faster, but they haven't completely exploited human abilities," says Jock D. Mackinlay, a user interface research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center's Information Sciences and Technologies Laboratory. He thinks that because of hardware constraints and costs, users will go for multiple-monitor arrangements before migrating to a single large, high-resolution monitor. His own desk contains an array of six 1,200-by-1,600 pixel LCD screens that connect to a Windows XP workstation with two graphics cards. The cost of the displays is about $5,000.
"Technically it was easy to do," Mackinlay says. "Just install the graphics cards, plug in the monitors, and I'm done." But while the basic setup works, he says it's buggy. For example, a window containing text may split across two screens, making it