Presentation of large objects on small displays

Abstract

A method for presenting at least a part of an object is shown, comprising at least partially dividing at least one object into a plurality of sub-objects, presenting the plurality of sub-objects in a first representation, making at least one sub-object of the plurality of sub-objects an active sub-object, and in response to a user operation on the at least one active sub-object, presenting at least one of the at least one active sub-objects in a second representation. The at least one object may be a 2D object, e.g. a Hypertext Markup Language HTML page or a page of a text document, or a 3D object, e.g. a Virtual Reality Markup Language VRML object, and said display may be integrated in a portable electronic device. The invention further relates to a device, a system, a computer program and a computer program product.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION [0001] This invention relates to a method, a computer program, a computer program product, a device and a system for presenting at least a part of an object on a display. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0002] The ongoing miniaturization of multi-media devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) or mobile phones in recent years appears to be only bounded by the perceptual limits of the human user. This particularly applies to the design of the displays of multimedia devices, with a remarkable trend to increase the relative area of the device that is consumed by its display. However, the display sizes of, for example, hand-held devices are necessarily significantly smaller than the display sizes, for which content is usually designed. If for instance content of the World Wide Web (WWW), i.e. web pages formatted according to the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or derivatives thereof (such as Extensible HTML (XHTML)), is to be displayed on the display of a ha...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

"The present invention provides a method, computer program, computer program product, device, and system for improving the presentation of large objects on small displays. The method involves dividing the object into multiple sub-objects, presenting them in a first representation, and making at least one of the sub-objects an active sub-object. The sub-objects may be presented in a different size and appearance than their original presentation size, and may be associated with each other. The first representation may be a small representation of the object, which may be easier to portray on a small display. The method allows for an overview on the information that is spread across several objects, and may require less scrolling to explore the sub-objects. The invention is useful for presenting information on large objects on small screens, such as in web browsers or mobile devices."

Problems solved by technology

However, the display sizes of, for example, hand-held devices are necessarily significantly smaller than the display sizes, for which content is usually designed.

Viewing web pages on a small display requires horizontal and vertical scrolling with scroll bars, which is generally experienced as uncomfortable or even annoying for the user.

This method of rendering the page so that it fits the width of the device's display causes at least the following problems: Rendered pages get very tall, so a lot of vertical scrolling is required.

The structure of the web page is not preserved well by the rendering process, for example form elements like input fields frequently get separated far away from each other if they are aligned using tables.

Even when such an original layout mode is provided by the browser, there arise further problems: As the web page area is big, a lot of panning and zooming is needed to explore the entire content of the web page.

On a small display, it is difficult to figure out the structure of a large page, i.e. the viewer may lose an overview of the entire web page.

Text paragraphs in the original layout usually are wider than the display width, so that paragraphs in the original layout mode on a small display are often difficult to read.

Quite similar problems are encountered when instead of two-dimensional (2D) objects (such as pages), three-dimensional (3D) objects are to be presented on a display.

There currently exists no technique to clearly present such usually large 3D objects on a small display.

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