Category Archives: tabletop

April 2009 – Face to face collaborative interfaces

New Book Chapter

Myself and one of my Masters students Florian Bodea from last year had a chapter on our research on Face to face collaborative interfaces published recently in the book on Human-Centric Interfaces for Ambient Intelligence by Elsevier [1]. This is edited by Hamid Aghajan, Stanford University, USA, Juan Carlos Augusto, University of Ulster, UK and Ramon Delgado, University of Granada, Spain.

Their description of the book states:
To create truly effective human-centric ambient intelligence systems both engineering and computing methods are needed. This is the first book to bridge data processing and intelligent reasoning methods for the creation of human-centered ambient intelligence systems. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book covers topics such as multi-modal interfaces, human-computer interaction, smart environments and pervasive computing, addressing principles, paradigms, methods and applications.

This book will be an ideal reference for university researchers, R&D engineers, computer engineers, and graduate students working in signal, speech and video processing, multi-modal interfaces, human-computer interaction and applications of ambient intelligence.

The Abstract of our chapter:

The presentation of information on large displays and their use to support collaboration in face to face activities has long been commonplace. Computationally enhanced displays relying on the form-factor of whiteboards, surfaces, tables, benches and desks now afford forms of face to face computer supported interaction and collaboration not possible with classical desktop or mobile computing. This chapter provides an introduction to the research and developments of multitouch input technologies which can be used to realise large interactive tabletop or “surface user interfaces”. Such hardware systems along with supporting software allow for applications which can be controlled through direct touch or multi-touch. Further, a review of gestural interactions and design guidelines for surface user interface design for collaboration are provided.

Key words: Tabletop, HCI, Surface User Interface, Gestural Interface, Design Guidelines

  1. Quigley A and Bodea F., Face to face collaborative interfaces, Book Chapter in Human Centric Interfaces for Ambient Intelligence, Elsevier 2009

Feb 2009 Just for Ross

Just for Ross, one of my PhD students, I've moved to some proper
blogging software. Previously I used Feeder, a mac based software app,
which I was very happy with. However, this didn't allow for linking,
commenting etc.. hence wasn’t really "blogging" instead mere note
taking. So after migrating 160 posts to blogger (o, by the way blogger
thanks for making this impossible to do automatically) here I am
emailing my blog this post! If this mail2blogger actually works I will
be well impressed.

Thanks also to Umer for taking the time out to demo a visualisation
application on our MERL Diamondtouch multi-touch surface. I will be
posting more on this as we develop our tutorial program for http://www.tis2009.org/ TableTop 2009

Dec 2008 Tutorials Co-Chair Clifton Forlines Tabletop 2009

Clifton from MERLI’m delighted to announce that Clifton Forlines, a Research Associate and Technical Staff member from Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge MA will be joining me as Co-Chair for the Tabletop 2009 Tutorials program. This is a fantastic development as Clifton has a vast range of experience in the area of Tabletop computing and has been a prolific publisher in the field. I trust our complementary academic and industry insights will allow us to develop an exciting and high impact program for these, the first ever Tabletop tutorials.

“Clifton Forlines is Research Associate at MERL. His research interests include the design and evaluation of novel user interfaces. Current research projects span from three-dimensional presentation of and navigation through recorded digital video, to collaborative tabletop user interfaces, to using hand-held projectors for augmented reality. He is currently leading the evaluation of three projects, MediaFinder, TimeTunnel, and DiamondSpin. Before coming to MERL, Clifton worked on Carnegie Mellon’s Alice project, which aimed at teaching programming to children through building interactive 3D worlds.” [ more ]

Dec 2008 Tutorials Chair, IEEE Tabletop and Interactive Surfaces 2009

Nov 2009 in Banff Canada…

TableTop 2009
I have been invited to be chair of the tutorials track for the Symposium on Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces 2009 to be held on Nov 23 to 25 in Banff Canada. This is the fourth event of this series and we expect this tutorial session to be an excellent opportunity for students, academics and practitioners to learn from leaders in this field.

The use of the tabletop as an input/output device is an exciting and emerging research area. This cross-disciplinary domain brings together experts in projector based display systems, augmented reality, user interface technologies, multi-modal interaction, input and sensing technologies, CSCW, and information visualization.

Oct 2008 PhD-position: Collaborative Tabletop Recommender – CLARITY

University College Dublin as part of the CLARITY research centre is seeking an exceptional candidate to apply for a postgraduate (PhD) research scholarship on a “Collaborative Tabletop Recommender” project.

CLARITY, the Centre for Sensor Web Technologies is a joint initiative between University College Dublin and Dublin City University and supported by the Tyndall National Institute. CLARITY is a research centre that focuses on the intersection between two important research areas, Adaptive Sensing and Information Discovery, to develop innovative new technologies of critical importance to Ireland’s future industry base and contribute to improving the quality of life of people in areas such as personal health, digital media and management of our environment. http://www.clarity-centre.com

Funding is available for a student to start in Jan 2009 or July 2009. The post will remain open until filled but preference will be given, in this first round call, to candidates who apply before Oct 31st 2008. Funding includes a scholarship, fee payment and an equipment and travel allowance. The use of equipment and travel budget is by agreement with academic supervisors.

The position is supervised by Dr. Aaron Quigley and Professor Barry Smyth.
http://www.csi.ucd.ie/staff/aquigley/home
http://www.cs.ucd.ie/Staff/AcademicStaff/bsmyth/

This post will be advertised in May 2009 for a start in Sept 2009.

Sept 2008 IEEE TableTop Session Chair

Our FTIR Tabletop in UCdLater this week I will be a session chair for Session 6 on Different Views: Display Techniques for Interactive Surfaces at Tabletop’08 the 3rd IEEE Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces Conference in Amsterdam. After being on the PC and reviewing many excellent papers I’m looking forward to attending both the bootcamp on FTIR development on Wednesday and the conference on Thursday and Friday. We have built a very large FTIR table that you can see to the left here so I’d like to learn more about possible refinements to improve its robustness etc. Our current projects with this surface revolve around collaborative visualisation in the Many-Hands project and coupling it with personal displays in coupled displays.

“The use of the tabletop as an input/output device is an exciting and emerging research area. This cross-disciplinary domain brings together experts in projector based display systems, augmented reality, user interface technologies, multi-modal interaction, input and sensing technologies, CSCW, and information visualization.

The purpose of the workshop is to bring together leading researchers in the field so that they can present and exchange current results of ongoing investigations. The 3rd IEEE TABLETOP Workshop will be held on October 2-3, 2008 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands with Sriram Subramanian & Shahram Izadi as TABLETOP Co-Chairs.”

TableTop Logo

June 2008 Journal Special Issue Call

Along with colleagues in Microsoft and Bristol we are editing a special issue of a journal to follow on from our PPD workshop last month in Italy.

Call for Papers for Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Special Issue:
Designing Multi-touch Interaction Techniques for Coupled Public and Personal Displays
Editors: Shahram Izadi, Aaron Quigley, and Sriram Subramanian

Synopsis:
This call for papers for a special issue follows on the successful workshop held at Advanced Visual Interfaces 2008 on the same topic (see http://ppd08.ucd.ie/ for workshop details). The special issue will focus on the research challenges and opportunities afforded by the combination of touch sensitive small personal input displays coupled with large touch sensitive public displays. Different touch-enabled devices rely on different types of touches (passive stylus, active stylus, fingers and tangible objects), the motivating question for this call is how do users switch between these devices and how to facilitate fluid transition from a collection of multiple displays to a single integrated multi-display environment.
Recent developments have seen the wide spread proliferation of both large shared- and small personal- interactive surfaces. Large interactive surfaces offer great potential for face-to-face work and social interaction and provide natural ways to directly manipulate virtual objects whereas small devices afford the individual a personal workspace or “scratch space” to formulate ideas before bringing them to a wider audience. Advanced visual interfaces can be built around a combination of both personal and public touch driven displays. Such computer mediated multi-device interaction between local touch-driven displays and shared public ones present a number of novel and challenging research problems.

Topics of interest to this special issue include (but are not limited to)

* Understanding the design space and identifying factors that influence Multi-touch interactions in Coupled Public and Personal Displays
* The impact of social conventions on the design of suitable interaction techniques for shared and personal displays
* Exploring interaction techniques that facilitate multi-display interfaces
* Personal displays as physical objects for the development of interaction techniques with shared multi-touch displays
* Novel interaction techniques for both personal and public multi-touch devices as part of multi-display environments
* Techniques for supporting input re-direction and distributing information between displays
* Developing evaluation strategies to cope with the complex nature of multi-display environments
* Ethnography and user studies on the use of coupled public and personal display environments
* Comprehensive surveys of the state-of-the-art that extend our understanding of the design space.

Submission details
Submissions should be between 6000 and 8000 words and authors are encouraged to use the Springer guidelines for authors, available at ftp://ftp.springer.de/pub/Word/journals
Submission in pdf electronic format should be emailed to Luke Conroy (luke.conroy@ucd.ie).

Dates
4th August 2008: 300 word abstract and expression of interest (optional)
15th August 2008: Feedback on abstract
29th August 2008: Full submission due
3rd October 2008: First Notification
5th December 2008: Revisions due
9th January 2009: Final Notification
June – Dec 2009: Planned publication

May 2008 Co-Chair PPD’08 – Naples Italy

PPD LogoAVI is going well but this Saturday I am co-chairing an international workshop on designing multi-touch interaction techniques for coupled public and private displays along with Shahram Izadi from Microsoft Research UK and Sriram Subramanian from Bristol University UK. The program for this workshop is now online and if you take a look you will see the range of very interesting workshop papers and participants. The objective of this workshop is to focus on the opportunities afforded by the combination of touch sensitive small private input displays coupled with large touch sensitive public displays. The main goals are to identify research challenges in the technology, application and evaluation of devices in such settings.

Workshop attendees will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers to a special issue of Springer’s Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. The goal is to have the authors submit extended versions of their papers by Sept 2008 (we realize CHI is around the corner, but we have a tight deadline from Springer). More details on this will be available at the Workshop and linked from the website.

May 2008 Tabletop’08 PC – IEEE Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces 2008

I was today invited to serve on the Program Committee for Tabletop’08 the 3rd IEEE Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces Conference in Amsterdam in October this year.

TableTop Logo
The use of the tabletop as an input/output device is an exciting and emerging research area.
This cross-disciplinary domain brings together experts in projector based display systems, augmented reality, user interface technologies, multi-modal interaction, input and sensing technologies, CSCW, and information visualization.

The purpose of the workshop is to bring together leading researchers in the field so that they can present and exchange current results of ongoing investigations.
The 3rd IEEE TABLETOP Workshop will be held on October 2-3, 2008 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Sriram Subramanian & Shahram Izadi TABLETOP 2008 Co-Chairs

Apr 2008 Pervasive 2008 Tutorial

Context-Rich but Keyboard-Free Pervasive Computing – Pervasive Computing User Interfaces – Aaron J Quigley – Pervasive 2008 Tutorials

Clearly there are classes of computing application which will rely on the classical screen, keyboard and mouse interfaces for sometime to come. However, we are seeing the emergence of pervasive computing applications and scenarios which go beyond the traditional application design or even mobile computing application design. Designing User Interfaces for the disappearing computer is difficult. By its very nature Pervasive Computing is trying to make the computer less of a focal point, making it, dare we say invisible! The challenge therefore becomes to provide simple, seamless, natural and context-aware interfaces to complex, subtle and oft invisible pervasive computing applications. Instead of overwhelming the user with a plethora of options, research as shown the need to develop personalized user interfaces that leverage past and group actions in user interface interaction. This tutorial will provide an overview of the approaches taken in the development of user interfaces for pervasive computing applications to date.