Media Interaction Lab

NiCE Formula Editor

mhaller — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 13:27:32 +0000

In this project we present the NiCE Formula Editor, which recognizes handwritten formulas to provide in situ computation and visualization. Our editor uses a novel hardware setup, suitable for use as a desktop or whiteboard that disambiguates pen and multi-touch input. In our interface, the pen writes and performs gestures, while touch manipulates. Multiple users can sketch mathematical expressions (e.g. formulas, vectors, matrices, etc.) with digital pens on the interactive surface. These expressions are analyzed and interpreted using the StarPad SDK’s support for mathematics recognition.

Daniel is working for the Mouse

mhaller — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:31:27 +0000

Daniel just finished his Master at the MIT Media Lab and moved to Pittsburgh. He is now working for Mickey Mouse =). Actually, he is working together with Ivan Poupyrev at Disney Research. Before moving to Disney, Ivan was working for Sony CSL in Tokyo - together with Jun Rekimoto. In fall, Daniel will go back to continue his PhD. WOW!

Doktor Peter Brandl

mhaller — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 10:13:31 +0000

We are really proud to make a really big announcement: Dr. Peter Brandl has successfully defended his PhD Thesis titled “The Design, Implementation and Evaluation of an Interactive Meeting Room” and has received the Dr. from the Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria. The whole Media Interaction Lab congratulates to this success.

MIL @ SIGGRAPH 2010

mhaller — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 20:03:44 +0000

We will present the “NiCE Formula Editor” at SIGGRAPH 2010. In this talk, we present a system, which recognizes handwritten formulas to provide in situ computation and visualization. Our editor uses a novel hardware setup, suitable for use as a desktop or whiteboard that disambiguates pen and multi-touch input. In our interface, the pen writes and performs gestures, while touch manipulates. Multiple users can sketch mathematical expressions (e.g. formulas, vectors, matrices, etc.) with digital pens on the interactive surface. These expressions are analyzed and interpreted using the StarPad SDK’s (from our friends at the Brown University) support for mathematics recognition. Pen and touch gestures can be used to manipulate the written expressions. In addition, expressions can be selected and moved by touch or pen input.

CRISTAL won Grand Prix at Laval Virtual 2010

rendl — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 11:04:25 +0000

We are happy to announce that CRISTAL won the Grand Prix du Jury at the Laval Virtual 2010. Laval Virtual is one of the largest Virtual Reality exhibitions worldwide and is hosted in Laval, France. Our team exhibited the CRISTAL installation for five days, not only to professionals but also for the first time to a public audience. In the attached video you can see some nice impressions from the Laval Virtual 2010.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Show as slideshow]

MIL is working together with CUTE Center

mhaller — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:43:41 +0000

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.

2 CHI full papers!

mhaller — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:28:37 +0000

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.

Impressions of ITS/Tabletop 2009

atomas — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 09:25:35 +0000

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.

On the first day Thomas presented the paper “CRISTAL: A collaborative home media and device controller based on a multi-touch display“. In his talk he primarily focused on the user interface of CRISTAL and the results of a pilot study. The slides are available for download.

The topic of Peter’s tutorial was “How to develop large-scale interactive surfaces“. He provided an overview of many different touch and pen tracking technologies and also provided some insights of our two tables FLUX and Light. His slides are not available yet, because we plan to publish the results in a journal survey, but you can send him an email for getting more information about that.

Talks & Projects we liked:

Websurface: Philip Tuddenham presented their work on bringing the web browser to the tabletop.
FluidPaint: Using real wet brushes on a FTIR table to draw is a really nice idea. Also the rendering engine for the drawn images looks very realistic.
Muscle sensing: Sometimes it is important that you know which finger is touching the surface. Hrovje Benko showed how they used muscle sensing to distinguish between the different fingers.
TUIO 2.0: In his talk Martin Kaltenbrunner showed the current status of the new TUIO protocol, which might be very useful in the future.

Staatspreis Multimedia 2009

mhaller — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:25:04 +0000

We are very happy to announce that the Media Interaction Lab got the Staatspreis Multimedia 2009 in the category Innovation for the project “CRISTAL”. CRISTAL is a multi-user tabletop experience which allows an easy interaction with multiple hardware devices.

SIGGRAPH Emerging Technology Award

mhaller — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:13:06 +0000

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.