The Hindu : Front Page : Software that can give a PC monitor a split personality!

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Sunday, Dec 02, 2007
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Software that can give a PC monitor a split personality!

Anand Parthasarathy

It enables two users to divide and share the display screen

— Photo: By Special Arrangement

Two users, one monitor: Microsoft’s India-based researchers have divided the computer screen so each half is controlled by a different keyboard and mouse.

Bangalore: So many users, so few personal computers — a problem faced by many educational institutions trying to give their students the Internet advantage.

Empathising with this challenge, scientists at the Bangalore unit of Microsoft Research have come up with a clever piece of software that will double the number of simultaneous users for every PC.

They have done this by giving the display monitor a ‘split personality’: while the left hand half of the screen works with one keyboard-mouse combo, the right hand can be controlled by another set.

In effect, two users can independently use the two halves of the split screen.

The research effort, led by Udai Singh Pawar and Kentaro Toyama, was showcased recently at Microsoft’s annual Innovation Summit. They say there is scope for collaboration between the two users: one user’s mouse can stray into the other’s half and the two could jointly edit a single document.

Earlier, the duo, with Joyojeet Pal, also created technology where one (unsplit) monitor can be shared by a number of children, each with his or her mouse. The split screen monitor is as yet in an experimental stage, but Microsoft hopes educators and others working to breach the so-called digital divide will come forward to help translate this prototype into a real product. Details of the research can be found on this Web page: http://research.microsoft.com/users/udaip/splitscreen.htm

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