As I sit here looking at my 22 inch screen I wonder why we do not already have screens that enable us to look up, left and right and see more screen. While I’m using my computer I have no desire to see my shelf, wall, window, everything else in my field of view other than screen.
Heck, even a 50 inch screen will be better than restricting my computing experience to roughly 20% of my field of view.
The most obvious answer is the cost. Also, there’s the space. If your TV takes up your whole wall, you’ve got that much less space to put anything else.
Anyway, careful what you wish for. I have to look at three computer monitors all day, and it’s not the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I can think of a couple quick reasons:
Cost. A monitor that takes up your entire field of vision would be expensive. Perhaps prohibitively so.
Unergonomic. Having to look back and forth, up and down might get tiring.
Diminishing Returns. Anything in our periferal vision wouldn’t buy us much in practicality.
Most add-on graphics cards can handle two monitors and you can get dual-head and triple-head adapters from Matrox which support 2 and 3 1280x1024 monitors respectively. Put two triple-heads on one graphics card and you’ve got a resolution of 3840x2048.
For work work I find two monitors a huge improvement over one, and there’s something about it which makes it an improvement over one large one: the only annoyance is not being able to play videos at 720p and 1080p
Here ya go: The Sony Glasstron.
Here ya go: Fifty Apple 30" (2560 x 1600) Monitors
I’m looking forward to the day when all four walls plus the ceiling of most rooms will consist of video screens. They will be adaptable for whatever function you want at the time.
I find my imagination works better when the space beyond my screen is deep, rather than shallow. When my desk is up against a wall, and I don’t have a vista, my work suffers noticeably. I seem to benefit from the ability to alternatively look out and then focus up close.
In other words, I think an all-encompassing screen would be quite detrimental (for me).
Personally, when I’m playing a game or watching a movie, I don’t like it to take up too much of my vision. Otherwise, I have to move my head to focus on one point, possibly missing something important on the opposite side.
For example, the first time I saw Bay’s Transformers movie, we were forced to sit near the front row at Rave Motion Picture’s huge arse screens. If you thought the fight scenes were confusing just watching it normally, watching them almost directly beneath the screen was indecipherable.
In games, do you really want to look way down to your right to see how much ammo you’ve got left?
Why can’t we have some of those oval screens, like they always have on alien spaceships?
Yeah, to the extent that you cannot possibly provide appropriate attention to a wall-sized monitor, I think there’s a limit to the desirable size of monitors. I think three screens ought to be big enough to support several important tasks and switch back and forth quickly without being tiresome to search through.
