Mobilkom Austria is supporting the Media Interaction Lab. The lab got hardware, which will be evaluated within the NiCE research center. The overall goal is to find intuitive interfaces not only for large displays (e.g. tabletops, interactive whiteboards), but also for small devices.
Archive
Stacey D. Scott from the University of Waterloo visited for a week the Media Interaction Lab. During her visit, she taught the course “Interactive Environments” focusing on Collaborative Systems Design . Moreover, Stacey gave a highly interesting talk on “Collaborative Large-Screen Display Systems in Complex, Dynamic Team Environments”.
We presented FLUX at the Medienmesse in Vienna at the Wohnzimmer 2012 lounge that was initiated by the ORF Wien, ZIT and echo Medienhaus. Our partner team7 provided additional furniture for the FLUX presentation. It was a good chance to introduce FLUX to the graphics and media advertising community. We showed the flexibility and different application areas for brainstorming and presentation tasks.
Being located near Linz, we of course enjoy the Ars Electronica Festival each year! The topic of this year’s festival was “A NEW CULTURAL ECONOMY – The Limits of Intellectual Property”, dealing with the freedom of information and copyright protection, big profit-making opportunities and the vision of an open knowledge-based society. We did not actively participate in the festival program this year, but here are some impressions and pictures from the festival.
The Media Interaction Lab presents IncreTable at SIGGRAPH 2008 (August 11-15, 2008). The installation will be presented in the category “New Tech Demo”. IncreTable is a tabletop game inspired by the Incredible Machine. It provides a multi-modal interaction based on a bi-directional projection tabletop, digital pens, a depth camera, and custom-made physical objects, while attracting users for an active participation in creating content which diffuses the boundary between the real and virtual world. Kyungdahm Yun (GIST), Maki Sugimoto, and Prof. Masahiko Inami are supporting this project.
More information about the new research studio NiCE can be found here. There is still place for companies to join this research project. For the next 3 years we will focus on novel large surfaces and new interaction techniques which are going to be embedded in our daily-life environment (e.g. living room, conference room etc.). In October, we will start setting up together with Team 7, Sony DADC and AMS Engineering a living room in the building of AMS Engineering. If you are interested in this research studio, please send me an email.
Currently, Jakob and Michael are visiting the National University of Singapore (NUS) for more than two months. Jakob is working at the Interactive Multimedia Lab performing an evaluation study for the IncreTable game, which will be demonstrated at SIGGRAPH 2008. Moreover, we will develop a light-version of our multi-touch and pen-based interface (FLUX). Finally, we also plan to set up a new co-operation and exchange programme with NUS (Mixed Reality Lab) and the Keio University (Japan).
Great news: our proposal for the Austrian Research Center “NICE, Natural user Interfaces for Collaborative Environments”, has been accepted. For the next 3 years we will focus on novel large surfaces and new interaction techniques which are going to be embedded in our daily-life environment (e.g. living room, conference room etc.). We will primarily focus on new interaction methods and build new hardware. This research will be supported by FFG and by the following partners: AMS Engineering (Austria), Ferrari (Italy), Microsoft (Austria), Nortel (Canada, USA), RTT (Germany), Sony DADC (Austria), Team7 (Austria), voestalpine Group-IT (Austria). Moreover, the following companies expressed their interest to support this project as well: Natural User Interface (Sweden), vodafone (Germany). If you have a passion for this topic and if you are interested in joining the team, please send an email to me.
Luis Durnwalder, the governor of the multilingual (Italian, German and Ladin) province of Bolzano-Bozen, South Tyrol, visited the Media Interaction Lab. Mr. Durnwalder liked the way how the lab is working and is looking forward for further cooperation.
AVI08 took place last week in beautiful Naples (Italy). No piles of rubbish at all, so we could enjoy the nice city and the really interesting conference. Our paper and digital whiteboard project (Paperizer) was shown as well as the result of last year’s cooperation with MERL, a combination of pen and direct touch interaction for controlling Photoshop. Visit or updated project pages to get more information, watch the videos or download the paper and presentation slides!
