Importance-Driven Compositing Window Management

Importance-driven compositing window management considers windows not only as basic rectangular shapes but also integrates the importance of the windows' content using a bottom-up visual attention model. Based on this information, importance-driven compositing optimizes the spatial window layout for maximum visibility and interactivity of occluded content in combination with see-through windows. We employ this technique for emerging window manager functions to minimize information overlap caused by popping up windows or floating toolbars and to improve the access to occluded window content. An initial user study indicates that our technique provides a more effective and satisfactory access to occluded information than the well-adopted Alt+Tab window switching technique and see-through windows without optimized spatial layout.

Insititution: Graz University of Technology
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BLJQWhsbDo
Year: 2010 - 2011

Publications

Markus Steinberger, Manuela Waldner, Dieter Schmalstieg
Interactive Self?Organizing Windows
In Computer Graphics Forum 31 (2pt3)
pages 621-630
May 2012
paper [PDF - 6.5 MB]

Manuela Waldner, Raphael Grasset, Markus Steinberger, Dieter Schmalstieg
Display-Adaptive Window Management for Irregular Surfaces
In Proceedings of the 2011 Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces Conference (ITS 2011)
October 2011
paper [PDF - 11.9 MB]

Manuela Waldner, Markus Steinberger, Raphael Grasset, Dieter Schmalstieg
Importance-Driven Compositing Window Management
In Proceedings of ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011)
pages 959-968
May 2011
paper [PDF - 3.9 MB]
Honorable Mention Award

Project List