Projects

While Mark Weiser's vision of ubiquitous computing is getting closer to reality, a fundamental part of it - the interconnection of devices into a "ubiquitous network" - is not achieved yet. Differences in hardware, architecture, and missing standardizations are just some reasons for this. We think that existing research is not versatile enough and too tailored to either single applications, hardware, or location. We contribute Connichiwa -- a versatile framework for creating web applications across multiple devices. We base Connichiwa on four key goals: integration of existing devices, independence of network infrastructure, versatility of application scenario, and usability of its API. Connichiwa runs web applications on off-the-shelf consumer devices. With no external dependencies, such as a server, it enables a great variety of possible scenarios. We tested the technical feasibility of Connichiwa in seven example applications and plan to evaluate the framework and the usability of its API in a one-week Hackathon.

Cross-device interaction between multiple mobile devices is a popular field of research in HCI. However, the appropriate design of this interaction is still an open question, with competing approaches such as spatially-aware vs. spatially-agnostic techniques. In this paper, we present the results of a two-phase user study that explores this design space: In phase 1, we elicited gestures for typical mobile cross-device tasks from 4 focus groups (N=17). The results show that 71% of the elicited gestures were spatially-aware and that participants strongly associated cross-device tasks with interacting and thinking in space. In phase 2, we implemented one spatially-agnostic and two spatially-aware techniques from phase 1 and compared them in a controlled experiment (N=12). The results indicate that spatially-aware techniques are preferred by users and can decrease mental demand, effort, and frustration, but only when they are designed with great care. We conclude with a summary of findings to inform the design of future cross-device interactions.

We present a tangible approach for exploring and comparing multi-dimensional data points collaboratively by combining Sifteo Cubes with glyph visualizations. Various interaction techniques like touching, shaking, moving or rotating the displays support the user in the analysis. Context dependent glyph-like visualization techniques make best use of the available screen space and cube arrangements. As a first proof of concept we apply our approach to real multi-dimensional datasets and show with a coherent use case how our techniques can facilitate the exploration and comparison of data points. Finally, further research directions are shown when combining Sifteo Cubes with glyphs and additional context information provided by multi-touch tables.

This paper presents Integrative Workplace, a system which blends the qualities of digital and physical sources by augmenting physical books with properties of digital books and vice versa. On the base of Blended Interaction, we designed a system which helps users to interact with the new and unfamiliar functionality of augmented documents and apply it to accomplish a real world task. In a user study, law students employed Integrative Workplace to work on a legal case. The positive feedback of participants indicated that we managed to design a system which is usable in a professional context. Furthermore, the study revealed evidence that participants apply Conceptual Blending to understand user interfaces and that digitally well-established concepts are a part of users’ reality. These findings resonate with the theoretical foundation of Blended Interaction. The results of this user study encourage us to continue to use Blended Interaction in the design process of novel user interfaces with an unfamiliar functionality.

Digitally augmented workspaces have been extensively researched in the last two decades. However, no studies exist which compare the work at digital desks with the work at normal desks to examine how digital desks might change knowledge work practices and its outcomes. This paper reports our work on the design and implementation of Integrative Workplace, a digital desk to support legal work. The prototype allows the user to search and excerpt content from digital and printed documents. In contrast to related works, the system enables parallel interaction with multiple paper documents spread on an entire desk. We identified five key requirements to develop the system and tested it in a pre-study. The study revealed a system usability between ok and good having an average SUS score of 66.94. In future work, we want to conduct a compa-rative study to research the effect of digital desks on users' working practices in the domain of legal work.

We present HuddleLamp, a desk lamp with an integrated RGB-D camera that precisely tracks the movements and positions of mobile displays and hands on a table. This enables a new breed of spatially-aware multi-user and multi-device applications for around-the-table collaboration without an interactive tabletop. At any time users can add or remove displays and reconfigure them in space in an ad-hoc manner without the need of installing any software or attaching markers. Additionally, hands are tracked to detect interactions above and between displays, enabling fluent cross-device interactions. The demo consists of the technical implementation of HuddleLamp's hybrid sensing and a Web-based architecture for installation-free ad-hoc collaboration. We demonstrate our implementation by showing a variety of possible interaction techniques.

Dynamic peephole navigation is an increasingly popular technique for navigating large information spaces such as maps. Users can view the map through handheld, spatially aware displays that serve as peepholes and navigate the map by moving these displays in physical space. We conducted a controlled experiment of peephole map navigation with 16 participants to better understand the effect of a peephole's size on users' map navigation behavior, navigation performance, and task load. Simulating different peephole sizes from 4' (smartphone) up to 120' (control condition), we confirmed that larger peepholes significantly improve learning speed, navigation speed, and reduce task load; however, this added benefit diminishes with growing sizes. Our data shows that a relatively small, tablet-sized peephole can serve as a 'sweet spot' between peephole size and both user navigation performance and user task load.

We present HuddleLamp, a desk lamp with an integrated RGB-D camera that precisely tracks the movements and positions of mobile displays and hands on a table. This enables a new breed of spatially-aware multi-user and multi-device applications for around-the-table collaboration without an interactive tabletop. At any time users can add or remove displays and reconfigure them in space in an ad-hoc manner without the need of installing any software or attaching markers. Additionally, hands are tracked to detect interactions above and between displays, enabling fluent cross-device interactions. The demo consists of the technical implementation of HuddleLamp's hybrid sensing and a Web-based architecture for installation-free ad-hoc collaboration. We demonstrate our implementation by showing a variety of possible interaction techniques.

This workshop paper envisions a future of selforganizing UIs for ubiquitous computing. It proposes using self-organization to join many co-located interactive devices into an ad-hoc community of devices that serves users as a single usable and seamless UI. All devices of the community are aware of each other’s presence and contribute their individual input/output capabilities for the common goal of providing users with a seamless, usable, and accessible interface that spans across device boundaries. This is achieved by letting the UI’s behavior emerge from simple rules that react to changes in presence, location, distance, orientation, and movement of neighboring devices and users. By using simple rules of proxemic interactions between devices, deterministic preciseness of classic top-down design and modeling is traded in against less controllable, but more adaptable, robust, and scalable bottom-up designs that automatically react to the dynamics of ad-hoc real-world usage.

In this position paper, we introduce our vision of interacting with future ubiquitous computing. It is based on a visual and functional adaptation of user interfaces to the presence and proximity of devices and users. We believe that this kind of adaptation based on proxemics is the key to a more social, natural, and usable interaction with digital technology. We discuss the promise of this novel style of interaction and its challenges based on previous and related work.

We present two experiments examining the impact of navigation techniques on users’ navigation performance and spatial memory in a zoomable user interface (ZUI). The first experiment with 24 participants compared the effect of egocentric body movements with traditional multi-touch navigation. The results indicate a 47% decrease in path lengths and a 34% decrease in task time in favor of egocentric navigation, but no significant effect on users’ spatial memory immediately after a navigation task. However, an additional second experiment with 8 participants revealed such a significant increase in performance of long-term spatial memory: The results of a recall task administered after a 15-minute distractor task indicate a significant advantage of 27% for egocentric body movements in spatial memory. Furthermore, a questionnaire about the subjects’ workload revealed that the physical demand of the egocentric navigation was significantly higher but there was less mental demand.

In my research, I explore the use of proxemics in Human-Computer Interaction to design explicit and implicit interaction with knowledge work environments for literature review, reading & writing, or discussion. This paper proposes the employment of proxemics for different tasks in knowledge work such as navigation in large information spaces (e.g. zooming and panning). To evaluate different designs, I created a physical environment with interactive walls and multi-touch tables alongside displays of various sizes to form a multi-display environment that enables measuring proxemic relationships (e.g. for manipulating a digital viewport according to a user's location and orientation in physical space). The aim of my dissertation is to design and evaluate different navigation concepts for large information spaces that employ Proxemic Interactions.

We present the user interface Blended Shelf, which provides a shelf browsing experience beyond the physical location of the library. Blended Shelf offers a 3D visualization of library collections with the integration of real-world attributes like the size and availability of books. The application reflects the actual arrangement of items in the physical library and enables implicit serendipitous support of the shelf browsing process in the digital world. The interface offers multiple views with different levels of detail regarding the collection as well as various entrance points to it. The user can explore and search the shelves by touch interaction. Tracking the user's position and line of sight ensures the ideal perspective on the interface. Thus, a user can explore collections in a familiar way and benefit from serendipitous browsing discoveries without forfeiting the advantages of the digital domain.

Social competence and communicative skills of children with autism spectrum disorders are supported by behavioral therapy. "Serious games", especially therapeutic games on a hybrid medium, have been proven to serve as a useful tool for behavioral therapy. In this work, we present such a hybrid therapy game: "Invasion of the Wrong Planet". Based on the game, we demonstrate essential design principles for the development of therapeutic games. We focus on specific aspects of behavioral therapy, depending on which desired behavior is encouraged and not enforced. The project provides a basis for discussion on how collaboration using therapeutic games in general can be improved.

This demo presents TwisterSearch, a system for co-located and collaborative Web search that was designed in accordance with the canonical model of social search by Evans and Chi (2009). In a first phase before search, participants frame the context of the intended search and thereafter gather initial information requirements on a tabletop. These requirements are then refined through discussion and yield the foundation for the search task itself, which is performed in parallel on multiple mobile displays. These private devices are used to search the Web for evidence files and to populate the visual workspace of the tabletop with them. Moreover, the personal device allows both a highly parallel search as well as a tightly-coupled collaborative search, to enable seamless switching between collective and solitary search activities. In our TwisterSearch demo, participants can have a firsthand experience of these different individual phases of social search.

Although Web search is typically regarded as a solitary activity, collaborative search approaches are becoming an increasingly relevant topic for HCI and distributed user interfaces (DUIs). Today’s collaborative search systems lack comprehensive search support that also involves pre- or post-search activities such as preparation or sensemaking. We believe that post-WIMP DUIs can help to better support social search and have identified four design goals that are critical for their successful design. In consequence, we present TwisterSearch, an interactive DUI prototype that meets our four design goals.

Libraries are well known as work places and thus have a common way of everyday use. Unfortunately, there is a gap between the physical and digital contents of a library and its media. By expanding the physical, tangible media with digital information, many new possibilities for interaction would open up for users. With the help of a prototype, we want to show how it is possible to shrink this gap with the use of blends and augmented reality. The Augmented Shelf allows for an overlay of digital information and additional functionality over a certain inventory in real time depending on the position of the user in a three dimensional space. The users are able to highlight physical artifacts, leave virtual commentaries and search for related media.

The ever-growing amount of digitized books and electronically published documents necessitates proper tools to search and explore such large digital information spaces. This paper presents the design of an interactive prototype for collaborative visual information seeking (VIS) in an on-line book repository. The main objectives of the prototype are a visual metaphor to query an on-line book repository and the facilitation of back-and-forth comparison of search results. Furthermore, an integrated cosine similarity search encourages for serendipitous discoveries while browsing through an information space.

Proxemics in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) offer new prospects for the design of explicit and implicit interaction techniques to support multiple users and a concurrent navigation for zoomable user interfaces (ZUI). In this paper we describe a navigation concept for zooming and panning based on a multi-display environment using proxemic relations as input (e.g. a user’s location and orientation in physical space to manipulate a viewport). We hope to foster awareness of the topic and to inspire further discussion and research on proxemics in HCI.

In this paper we state our interest in the workshop themes according to the three categories understanding, designing, and evaluation. In addition, we give a short introduction into our research project Blended Library and describe the idea of an "Interactive Reading" environment that aims toward “encouraging serendipity in interactive systems".

Social activities such as collaborative work and group negotiation can be an essential part of information seeking processes. However, they are not sufficiently supported by today’s information systems as they focus on individual users working with PCs. Reality-based UIs with their increased emphasis on social, tangible, and surface computing have the potential to tackle this problem. By blending characteristics of real-world interaction and social qualities with the advantages of virtual computer systems, they inherently change the possibilities for collaboration, but until now this phenomenon has not been explored sufficiently. Therefore, this paper presents an experimental user study that aims at clarifying the impact such reality-based UIs and its characteristics have on collaborative information seeking processes. Two different UIs have been developed for the purpose of this study. One is based on an interactive multi-touch tabletop in combination with on-screen tangibles, therefore qualifying as a reality-based UI, while the other interface uses three synchronized PCs each controlled by keyboard and mouse. A comparative user study with 75 participants in groups of three was carried out to observe fundamental information seeking tasks for co-located collaboration. The study shows essential differences of emerging group behavior, especially in terms of role perception and seeking strategies depending on the two different UIs.

dc.title:

dc.contributor.author: Reiterer, Harald; Heilig, Mathias; Rexhausen, Sebastian; Demarmels, Mischa

dc.title:

dc.contributor.author: Heilig, Mathias; Demarmels, Mischa; Allmendinger, Katrin; Gerken, Jens; Reiterer, Harald

This paper discusses the topic of social interaction in the field of information-seeking. With our design of the “search tokens”, we suggest a new hardware setting and a novel tangible and multi-touch based user interface to support users in their informationseeking process and enabling co-located, collaborative knowledge work. We showcase our design with a scenario of a media library, presenting movies as information objects on a zoomable information landscape.

This paper introduces a touch-sensitive two-dimensional scatter plot visualization, to explore and analyze movie data. The design focuses on the ability to work co-located with several users. These are able to create several focus regions through distortion techniques triggered by multi touch gestures. Furthermore, the introduced visualization is an example how promising concepts from InfoVis research can be transferred onto multi touch tables in order to offer more natural interaction.