Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system – Display driving control circuitry – Controlling the condition of display elements
Reexamination Certificate
2000-02-11
2002-11-05
Kincaid, Kristine (Department: 2174)
Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system
Display driving control circuitry
Controlling the condition of display elements
C345S592000, C345S629000, C345S950000, C345S588000, C707S793000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06476831
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to the field of data processing. Particularly, this invention relates to a realtime graphical overlay that provides visual scrolling feedback for a display window that offers a view into a presentation space or a viewport. The graphical feedback overlay is transient and provides direct visual guidance to the user about new areas being exposed to view by the scrolling action. The feedback overlay fades from view within a predetermined or programmable period of time, or when the scrolling action is stopped. The feedback overlay substantially enhances the user's ability to maintain spatial context while the document is being scrolled, reducing error and strain, and enhancing ease of use and productivity.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
In the early days of the personal computer, browsing a document was difficult to do. The document would often take up several screens worth of information, and it was difficult for the user to find specific sections of the document. The user would often have to scroll through an entire document one screen at a time, by pressing function keys assigned to “scroll up” and “scroll down” functions in an often futile attempt to find a specific section. This was slow and cumbersome, and resulted in many users printing the entire document instead of trying to view it on the display. This constituted a significant waste of valuable manpower and natural resources.
The advent of the “graphical user interface” (GUI) programs ushered an optimistic outlook to addressing the above problem. Scrolling the content in a GUI window is one of the most frequent tasks in interacting with today's computers. The content of the GUI window scrolled, also referred to herein as “document,” can be a file directory, a word processing file, a computer program source code, a spreadsheet, a two-dimensional map or image, an engineering drawing, a world wide web page, and so forth.
Traditionally, there are three ways to scroll through a document. One is by pressing on the cursor keys in the computer board. The second is by pressing the “page up” and “page down” keys. The third is a feature of the GUI programs and is referred to as a “scroll bar”. The scroll bar is commonly associated with a display window, and is most useful when only a small portion of a document can be displayed in a display window at any one time. The scroll bar contains what is known as a “slider”. The slider's relative position in the scroll bar graphically indicates the position of the display window relative to the entire document being displayed. One scroll bar is often used to indicate the relative vertical position, while another scroll bar can be used to indicate the relative horizontal position.
A scroll bar is normally used in conjunction with an input device such as a mouse, track ball, or light pen. When a user wants to move to a different section of a document, he or she can either move the mouse cursor to a new position on the scroll bar (click operation), or place the mouse cursor on the slider, press and hold one of the mouse buttons, and move the mouse cursor either one side or the other of the slider (drag operation). While both of these operations are helpful in rapidly moving from one section of a document to another section, they do not sufficiently help the user to find the specific section of the document he or she is looking for.
A standard technique often used in representing scroll bars is to make the slider on the scroll bar of proportional length, representing the portion of the full document which is in view. This places the viewed section in context with respect to the entire document, but does not directly relate to the newly exposed document portion after a scrolling action. If the document is very large relative to the portion currently being viewed in the window (e.g., as in a very long galley of text, or at high magnification of a two-dimensional image), the size of the slider becomes too small to interpret or use.
Another technique is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,532,715 to Bates et al., titled “Visually Aging Scroll Bar”, where a visually aging scroll bar is associated with a window or viewport on a computer display, and contains a slider to indicate relative positioning in the window of a document. After a first predetermined sampling period has elapsed, a first region matching the current position of the scroll bar slider is created. The visual appearance of the region is determined by a predetermined region heating rate. For example, a newly created region starts at “cold”, which can be indicated by a violet-indigo color. After a second sampling period has elapsed, the computer system again checks the current position of the scroll bar slider. If the current position still matches the first region, the visual appearance of the first region symbolically “warms up” as indicated by the region heating rate. This incrementally changing visual appearance continues for as long as the current slider position matches the first region, up until a maximum region symbolic “temperature” is reached.
Some techniques adopt an input device that offers a dedicated scrolling mechanism to enhance the operation of the scroll bar, by making it easier for a user to find a specific section he or she is looking. One such scrolling mechanism is the ScrollPoint® stick which is incorporated in the IBM ScrollPoint® mouse. Another mechanism is a scroll wheel described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,530,455 to Gillick et al. and titled “Roller Mouse for Implementing Scrolling in Windows Applications”. Another scrolling mechanism is IBM's TrackPoint® that includes a button, which, when pressed, enables scrolling in IBM's Thinkpad® TrackPoint® notebook computers. Yet another mechanism is the touchpad where scroll areas are used for examples in notebook and keyboards.
The relative input control performance of the above scrolling mechanisms has been studied in Zhai, S., Smith, B. A., Selker, T., “Improving Browsing Performance: A Study of Four Input Devices for Scrolling and Pointing Tasks,” Proceedings of INTERACT: the Sixth IFIP conference on Human Computer Interaction, pages 286-292 (1997). While these scrolling mechanisms may have realized their intended purposes, scrolling through documents is often confusing and causes a loss of context for the user, regardless of the input devices used, particularly since conventional scrolling mechanisms do not offer spatial clues or visual scrolling feedback, especially if the document consists of visually similar sections of material such as a continuous text.
For example, when using a page up or page down key, many applications scroll by one window length of document, so that the user can expect where the last read sentence should appear after the operation. A common frustrating experience with page keys, however, occurs when the user reaches the end of the document, where the remaining document is arbitrary in relation to a window's length which depends on the user's setting and resizing. The remaining document is scrolled into the window, but the user has to search through the document to locate the last read sentence.
The lack of visual scrolling feedback is evident in both one-dimension, such as when scrolling through long galleys of material (i.e., web pages), and in two-dimensions, such as when panning or zooming through maps and engineering drawings. It is aggravated on small-display devices, such as handheld devices, where loss of context requires extensive mental effort, eye motion and time to re-acquire the context, reducing productivity and increasing the user's strain and fatigue level.
In most conventional GUI software applications “windowing” occurs when the user's physical scrolling action causes the viewing window to “move” in the same direction. However, the viewing window does not actually move in relation to the computer physical monitor or the user's body. What moves is the document although in the opposite direction to the user's input. Reference is mad
Wirth Michael Clarence
Zhai Shumin
International Business Machine Corporation
Kassatly Samuel A.
Kincaid Kristine
Muhebbullah Sajeda
LandOfFree
Visual scrolling feedback and method of achieving the same does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this patent.
If you have personal experience with Visual scrolling feedback and method of achieving the same, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Visual scrolling feedback and method of achieving the same will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFUS-PAI-O-2935807