The Polymorphic Display — February 19th, 2010

Displays, Ergonomics, Panoramic Vision, TV

Browsing the web, writing a post, reading an ebook, coding cascade style sheets... All the time is the same thing, scrolling up and down. While content was born to grow vertically, screens are growing in horizontal size resulting in gorgeous widescreen surfaces. Vertical content prevails in a horizontal shaped medium these days. Is it not a contradiction?

From 4:3 To 16:9

Once upon a time screens were square boxes, formally built with an aspect ratio equal to 4:3 and matching the original standard for films. A high percent of households had a television which matched those specifications.
However, the widescreen format was later introduced in some short films, requiring to truncate the image sides in order to completely fill 4:3 TV screens. Over the years, this wide-screening current became the norm, forcing the industry to manufacture screens with an aspect ratio greater than 4:3, and converting boxy televisions in pieces of museum.

The market of personal computers has evolved in a similar way.
From the Commodore PET and its perfect square shaped —with rounded corners— monitor, to today's superb iMac 16:9 displays. Likewise, the tiny square screen of the GRiD Compass 1101 laptop has fallen behind, giving way to fresh wide-screened laptops.

So far, so good. The wide-screening progress seems to not only guarantee a better enjoyment of widescreen formatted contents, but also takes advantage of our panoramic vision capabilities as human beings.

Content Is 360 Degrees

Though wide-screening seems a natural and reasonable thing, I would say this tendency does not appropriately suit with the way we use computers. Why? Well, just think on how much time you watch a 16:9 movie on your laptop and then compare that amount of time with the daily use you make of the vertical scroll bar. Either using a text processor or reading a blog I dare say we generally spend more time scrolling up and down than scrolling right and left.

My suggestion is to produce screens higher rather than wide. Perhaps I am pointing out a crazy idea, but let me explain some few circumstances that would reinforce my weird theory.

First matter is concerning screen resolution and white space on the web.
A noticeable thing while browsing text heavy websites such as blogs, is the huge amount of white space that surrounds main text paragraphs. Not only blogs, but also Google's search results are presented in snippets of a width around 500 pixels, leaving more than a half part of the screen empty.
Of course this is not a trivial thing since a moderate paragraph width asures good readability. But this aspect certainly puts in evidence that sometimes full screen width is not required.

The second point that will give another lift to my theory concerns the mobile arena.
I want to focus on mobiles with a super big sized screen. Those in which the screen surface covers all the device, for instance the iPhone. The fact is that these mobile phones are conceived to work in portrait mode by default.
Eureka! Here we have the first case of a screen higher than wide. Of course, I'm sure ergonomic reasons are behind this, but I actually find this portrait mode a super comfortable method. Just double tap to focus on text content and dispatch those XXL white margins.

I also have an eureka moment with Tablets, eBook readers, or recently popped up iPads. All these sort of gadgets have a portrait modus operandi. This concept probably has the paper metaphor as a basis, and also the fact that, originally, the prime purpose of those devices was to read or to write.
However, an opportune observation appears when digging a bit into iPad (or iPhone) behavior. Notice when iPads switch to landscape mode? Yes, when a movie is being played. Why? Because is then when we can exploit the capabilities of the widescreen format. So logical, and practical.

It is precisely the above paragraph what makes me reconsider my initial theory. And I should say that yes, it was a bit weird in fact.
To design higher than wide screens does not solve the problem. The solution to the problem is to assume that it is no more about screen form factors but about contents. The solution is to create devices ready to dynamically fit its form according with contents, whatever they are. The solution is the polymorphic display.