The Virtual Workspace

Overview

The Virtual Workspace illustrates how immersive technology can be used to increase productivity within the standard 2D desktops we are used to. The system consists of a head-mounted display with an TRK300 orientation tracker attached to it; these two interface with a modified copy of the FVWM window manager. The end result is a viewing window on a virtual desktop which tracks with the users' head movements. This offers the illusion of an arbitrarily large desktop while decoupling the users' hand movements from his view of the screen for more efficient use.

Implementation

The first implementation was a demonstration program that was written in 1995 with Mike Horton and Mark Spiller. It used a hacked version of FVWM which polled for tracker input in its main loop, and sent signals to the pager to control scrolling.

Since then, newer versions of FVWM have been released, with an API by which modules can be written to interface directly with the window manager. Now the pager is a standalone module which runs in its own process; communication with FVWM is handled through pipes.

I have started to rewrite the the pager code so that in addition to offering an overview of the desktop, it can also display a 3D compass which allows the user to better visualize the relationship between his head-movements and the paging of the viewport.

At left, a screen shot of the modified pager. On the right is the Virtual Technologies FS5 HMD in which the screen is viewed.

Conclusions

While the system is conceptually sound, there are several unfortunate points which prohibit the project from being fully successful:

• As is, FVWM lacks double-buffering, which results in obnoxious flickering while the system is paging. There are no easy workarounds for this problem, but it will be addressed in a future release.



• Head-Mounted Display technology lacks sufficient resolution to display what can be displayed in a normal monitor. This means that only a portion of the screen is shown, and all text must be in large fonts. However, today's state-of-the-art HMD's are a significant improvement over what was available when we started looking at the technology. We anticipate that eventually HMD resolution will actually eclipse that of standard monitors.

Despite these shortcomings, the Virtual Workspace represents a small vision of the future of user interface integrated with the current WIMP (windows, icon, mouse, pointer) interaction. If you have the inclination, please feel free to grab the code and insert hooks for your own HMD and tracker.