Interactive Self-Organizing Windows

Abstract

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a dynamic window management technique that changes the perception of windows as fixed-sized rectangles. The primary goal of self-organizing windows is to automatically display the most relevant information for a user's current activity, which removes the burden of organizing and arranging windows from the user. We analyze the image-based representation of each window and identify coherent pieces of information. The windows are then automatically moved, scaled and composed in a contentaware manner to fit the most relevant information into the limited area of the screen. During the design process, we consider findings from previous experiments and show how users can benefit from our system. We also describe how the immense processing power of current graphics processing units can be exploited to build an interactive system that finds an optimal solution within the complex design space of all possible window transformations in real time.