The two workers can also open up a third area on the screen — Pawar calls it an "airlock" — where the users can place shared files and resources. Pawar said that the system is optimal for tasks such as data entry and simple word processing, where screen real estate is not a problem. It can also work well in scenarios where the two people need to share data across their screens or work on documents together.
"If we have a shared display we have a shared point of focus," said Jeremy Birnholtz, a postdoctoral fellow with the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto.
But sharing in such close proximity could also bring up permission problems, he said.
"There's a trickiness to the boundaries in terms of what's mine and what's yours. How much access do you have to it? Or am I still the owner?" he said.
The Microsoft team will be investigating these issues and more in field trials scheduled to start in mid-May, so it could be a couple of years before the split screen is bringing coworkers together.
