The Media Interaction Lab is now working together with the Keio-NUS CUTE Center. For the next three years (starting in February, 2010) the lab will send students to Singapore for working on next generation ambient displays. We will mainly focus on flexible displays using shape memory alloy material. Together with the team in Singapore (which focuses on the hardware), the Austrian team will develop the applications and design the user studies. It is great that the lab will also get support from Inami, Nii, and Maki from the Keio University.
The Media Interaction Lab will present two full papers at CHI 2010. In the first paper “The NiCE Discussion Room: Integrating Paper and Digital Media to Support Co-Located Group Meetings” we introduce a novel digital meeting room design, the NiCE Discussion Room, which integrates digital and paper tools into a cohesive system with an intuitive pen-based interface. This design solution provides groups with a flexible design solution that enables them to create, access, and share information and media from a variety of sources to facilitate group discussions. The paper describes the design solution, along with results from a user study conducted to evaluate the usability and utility of the system.
The second paper “NiCEBook – Supporting Natural Note Taking” we present a digital paper notebook that supports taking, structuring and reusing notes. Through a study of note-taking habits, we observed that different strategies are used to organize and share notes. Based on these findings, we developed a design for a notebook that combines different approaches to better support these activities. The details of our design were informed by an additional online survey. With NiCEBook, we present a solution that combines the flexibility and simplicity of taking notes on paper with the benefits of a digital representation.
Last week we attended the International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Tabletops 2009 in Banff/Canada to have a look at the latest developments in Surface and Tabletop Research. We also presented a paper about our tabletop remote control CRISTAL and gave a tutorial about input technologies for large displays. The conference took place in the impressive Banff Springs Hotel which is placed in a quite nice landscape as you can see in the picture.
We are very happy to announce that the Media Interaction Lab got the Staatspreis Multimedia 2009 in the category Innovation for the project “CRISTAL”. Â CRISTAL is a multi-user tabletop experience which allows an easy interaction with multiple hardware devices.
Best Emerging Technology Award for the project CRISTAL at the 36th International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH 2009). An interesting article has been published in WIRED, Engadget, and Engadget Japan. A nice Youtube video can be found here.
We proudly present the world’s largest Anoto pattern! 28 Anoto pages (each A0 size) are stitched to create a single large Anoto pattern that covers a table surface of 5.3 x 3.5m. The pattern is overlaid on top of a large scale city map. Produced for the Ars Electronica GeoCity exhibition, multiple users are able to interact with this map to learn about the city of Linz. Despite the large dimensions of the table, the high accuracy of the Anoto tracking is guaranteed across the whole surface. Further large scale Anoto surfaces are already in production by our team.
Vice-chancellor Josef Pröll was visiting the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences. During his visit, he also played with our interactive table, FLUX, which has been developed in cooperation with Team 7 and voestalpine group IT GmbH. The new version of the FLUX table allows both multi-touch hand input as well as pen input with high accuracy and high performance.
Last week we went to the 10th RTT Conference in Munich. In this conference Realtime Technologies (RTT) and its partners presented their newest products in high-quality real-time rendering. Completely surrounded by really nice renderings of cars we presented a small multi-touch tabletop application for manipulating textures on 3D-models. In addition our project CRISTAL won the RTT Contest this year.
We are happy to announce that we will present our project CRISTAL at the Emerging Technologies at Siggraph 2009 in New Orleans. CRISTAL (Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces) provides an extreme simple user interface for controlling multimedia devices and home automation systems.
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CHI 2009 was highly impressive this year and we presented two demos at the Interactivity session: FLUX table and our Occlusion-Aware Menu. Our first attendance to CHI was a good chance to introduce our work to the HCI community. We got some really good feedback about both of our projects. Furthermore, we were able to watch some really interesting talks and presentation.
