Information visualization on large, high-resolution displays: Issues, challenges, and opportunities

Larger, higher-resolution displays are becoming accessible to a greater number of users as display technologies decrease in cost and software for the displays improves. The additional pixels are especially useful for information visualization where scalability has typically been limited by the number of pixels available on a display. But how will visualizations for larger displays need to fundamentally differ from visualizations on desktop displays? Are the basic visualization design principles different? With this potentially new design paradigm comes questions such as whether the relative effectiveness of various graphical encodings are different on large displays, which visualizations and datasets benefit the most, and how interaction with visualizations on large, high-resolution displays will need to change. As we explore these possibilities, we shift away from the technical limitations of scalability imposed by traditional displays (e.g. number of pixels) to studying the human abilities that emerge when these limitations are removed. There is much potential for information visualizations to benefit from large, high-resolution displays, but this potential will only be realized through understanding the interaction between visualization design, perception, interaction techniques, and the display technology. In this paper we present critical design issues and outline some of the challenges and future opportunities for designing visualizations for large, high-resolution displays. We hope that these issues, challenges, and opportunities will provide guidance for future research in this area.