The Big See: Large Scale Visualization

Display size and resolution has been increasing at a steady pace with the economies of scale of computing. Wall-sized displays, previously only seen in specialized centres are now affordable and being used for information visualization. But what do we know about the constraints and opportunities in designing for such Large Scale Information Displays (LSiDs)? How can one design text visualizations to take advantage of the large scale and public space of a LSiD? In this paper we describe the variety of technologies being used to create LSIDs and some example installations. We then discuss the literature about LSID information design and present two visualization ideas we have developed for LSiDs called the Big See and LAVA. We conclude with design principles that we have drawn up to guide our work.