<title>Improvement of the user interface of multimedia applications by automatic display layout</title>

Abstract

Technische Universitat Braunschweig, Institut furDatenverarbeitungsanlagen, Germany, D-38106 BraunschweigABSTRACTMultimedia research has mainly focussed on real-time data capturing and display combined with compression, storage andtransmission of these data. However, there is another problem considering real-time selecting and arranging a possibly largeamount of data from multiple media on the computer screen together with textual and graphical data of regular software. Thisproblem has already been known from complex software systems, such as CASE and hypertext, and will even be aggravated inmultimedia systems. The aim of our work is to alleviate the user from the burden of continuously selecting, placing and sizingwindows and their contents, but without introducing solutions limited to only few applications. We present an experimentalsystem which controls the computer screen contents and layouts, directed by a user and/or tool provided information filter andprioritization. To be application independent, the screen layout is based on general layout optimization algorithms adapted fromthe VLSI layout which are controlled by application specific objective functions. In this paper, we discuss the problems of acomprehensible screen layout including the stability of optical information in time, the information filtering, the layout algo-rithms and the adaptation of the objective function to include a specific application. We give some examples of different stan-dard applications with layout problems ranging from hierarchical graph layout to window layout. The results show that theautomatic tool independent display layout will be possible in a real time interactive environment.Keywords: User interfaces, multimedia, information retrieval, combinatorial optimization, graph layout