Test2

One way to handle the representation of (and the navigation in) datasets that exceed the available display space is by provisioning movable viewports which display a subset of the entire space. Unlike static viewports, where the information space is moved (e.g. by panning), dynamic viewports – so-called dynamic peepholes – allow the user to move the viewport in physical space and thereby enable egocentric navigation in digital information spaces.

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.

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.

Many tasks performed in multiscale visual spaces require the user to have several foci. Using bimanual interaction, multitouch devices can facilitate the simultaneous definition and exploration of several foci. However, multitouch is rarely used for multifocus navigation, and may limit the interaction to a sequential definition of areas of interest. We introduce two novel navigation techniques that combine multiple foci and bimanual touch, and therefore enable the isochronic definition of areas of interest, leading to simultaneous multifocus navigation. SpaceFold folds the visual space in the third dimension, allowing users to bring objects closer to each other. Our technique enables a direct, bimanual manipulation of a folded space and therefore provides high flexibility. PhysicLenses uses multiple magnification lenses to compare objects. Using a physics model, PhysicLenses introduces a general solution for the arrangement of multiple lenses within the viewport. We conducted a controlled experiment with 24 participants to compare the techniques with split screen. The results show that SpaceFold significantly outperformed all other techniques, whereas PhysicLenses was just as fast as split screen.

Drunken Ed is a 2D balance game specifically designed for public displays in which the player has to balance a swaying drunkard with her body pose. We show that this casual game is well suited for public context and that camera based body tracking offers convenient interaction techniques for large screen displays. The game setting with its drunken protagonist Ed was well received by the players. This single player game uses the angle of the player's torso in relation to the ground to help Ed keep balance in a wobbling world. Ed's body pose reflects the player's pose, creating a very direct form of control. Results of our evaluation show that this form of control mapping is very easy to learn and the short play sessions meet the requirements of a casual game in public environment. Furthermore, we have designed our level selection menu to fulfill the double purpose of a gameplay tutorial, which was found to be well suited for games on public displays.

Hybrid games have been shown to be an effective tool for cognitive-behavioral therapy. We developed the hybrid therapy game Invasion of the Wrong Planet and conducted two consecutive studies both with children with and without autistic spectrum disorders (ASD). The studies contrast the design principle of "Encouraged Collaboration" (ECC) with the design principle of "Enforced Collaboration" (EFC). While EFC has been used in recent work on therapy games for ASD, EFC is derived from specific aspects of behavioral therapy. The results show that children across both groups prefer ECC over EFC, while both design principals elicit comparable degrees of collaboration between players. The higher preference may increase motivation and therefore ECC could enhance the effectiveness of games used in behavioral therapy. Latter aim at fostering the social competence and communicative skills of children with ASD.

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.

Control rooms are facilities that serve as operations centers to supervise complex processes, e.g. in power plants or industrial production plants. In today’s control rooms operators mainly interact with these processes via desktop computers. From a cognitive point of view mediation of process dynamics by means of keyboard, mouse and computer displays is insufficient as perception is heavily reduced to the visual sense. Mounted on the framework Blended Interaction we present novel interaction styles that holistically address the domain specific requirements and support several forms of interaction in control room environments.

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.

Blended Interaction is interaction in physical environments including meeting rooms, design studios, or libraries, that are augmented with new UI technologies to blend the power of digital computing with natural work practices and collaboration styles. It combines the virtues of physical and digital artifacts so that desired properties of each are preserved and computing is integrated in a considered manner. Since rapid technological advances constantly challenge existing designs, we believe that HCI should move beyond creating new technologies, single applications, and novel interaction techniques towards an overarching unified vision and theory of Blended Interaction. Our workshop will bring together leading experts in cognitive theories and post-WIMP designs and technologies to create this unified view of Blended Interaction in a multidisciplinary approach.

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 paper, we tie together different streams of research from our institutions to present a joint vision of collaborative computer-supported interactions in future crisis rooms. We envision novel interaction and visualisation techniques for the next generation of crisis rooms that will better support collaborative search, analysis, andcomparison of data during sensemaking activities. Such a sensemaking activity for example could be the production of daily situation reports. We focus on how users can benefit from device ecologies consisting of big wall displays, interactive tabletop surfaces and tangible user interfaces during such activities.

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.

When considered through the lens of ubiquitous computing, interactive wall displays represent a promising infrastructure to provide information services. In the context of public libraries the design has to take particular account on two domain-speci c aspects. First, libraries are valued for their calm atmosphere. Thus, interaction has to occur in an unobtrusive manner. This is challenging as interactive displays need to catch assers-by's attention to communicate interactivity. Second, given that public libraries are demographically diverse places, a low barrier to entry has to be guaranteed to provide access to the largest possible number of visitors. With ADAPTIKs we present the concept of an interactive display that makes use of visual adaption as a means to unobtrusively attract the visitors' attention. The concept bases on a contextual analysis and illustrates how the visitors' position and body movements can be used to generate an adaptive silhouette that acts as a keyhole to an information landscape.

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.

In this paper we suggest novel interaction and visualization techniques for a prospective ECML crisis room environment focusing on the analysis of social media data. For this purpose we describe both, concepts providing a Daily Newsflash and concepts for the preparation of Daily Reports referring to a selected incident or crisis situation. The Daily Newsflash is an overview of global incidents regarding humanitarian crises, natural disasters, disease outbreaks, conflicts, etc. Such a bulletin typical contains 1-5 international items with brief facts and 1-5 European items. For selected incidents or crisis situations a Daily Report is prepared. A typical Daily Report consists of one page usually providing a map, key facts, and a brief summary of the situation.

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.

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 this note we introduce Body Panning, a novel interaction technique for horizontal panning on interactive surfaces. Based on an established sensory hardware setup, we implemented a robust body tracking system for a largescaled tabletop. On this basis a user can pan through a spatial user interface by adjusting her position at the table. As a natural form of interaction, this technique is convenient and applicable to many existing use cases and applications, as we will present in this note. Besides, we expected to see positive effects on the user’s navigational and spatial memory performance. We conducted an experiment between a common touch panning and a body panning interface to find out about differences in these performances. For the body panning condition, we observed an increased spatial memory performance and an invariant navigation performance. We present and discuss these results focusing on application domains for the body panning technique.