Many times when I go to Boston I try to pay a visit to a little shrine of technology called the Sony store in the Prudential Center. They always have some cool gadgetry on display. I was not disappointed a few weeks ago either. This time it was an all-in-one desktop computer that caught my eye, the Sony Vaio L Series. The best part: it is multitouch enabled running Windows 7.

Here at the lab we are very interested in multitouch technology as reported before. Our research is made even more relevant with the commercialization of affordable touch computers. Other companies have also come up with multitouch desktop systems for personal use: HP, Dell, etc. But Sony always puts a bit of extra effort in making their products even more stylish. And with the advent of Windows 7, an inherently multitouch operating system, touch computers start to make perfect sense. The Vaio L also dubs as an HDTV and a Blue-ray disk player/recorder.

I quickly double tapped the virtual globe application on the desktop. The Virtual Earth / Bing Maps style environment popped up quickly. I was multitouch navigating to my home town in no time. The feel of touching the computer screen was a little bit strange, because until now we all tried to keep fingers off from our beloved monitors. The feel of it was sleek, like our TouchKit table and unlike the Microsoft Surface, which is textured. All in all it was a very pleasant experience using this computer. It is going to be interesting to see how this new concept of human computer interaction will change the perception and use of desktop computers in the coming years.

Oszkar

Last Friday, a few of us from P54 attended a day long student conference geared towards human factors and ergonomics. The conference was very interesting, showcasing about 20 presentations dealing with various fields. Three of us from P54 (only ones from NH) gave presentations on our current research. I gave my presentation on our research on the multitouch display with geotagged & oriented photos.

It was a valuable experience for me, since I have not yet given a presentation to so many people whom I did not know. Of course, I was nervous at first, but it went away as my presentation started, and went well overall. I’m sure I will have to make more of these types of presentations in the future, so it was very good practice. Aside from my presentation, I also enjoyed a lot of other things from the conference. One of the other presentations was focused on controlling fully automated search and destroy robots in the field, and how often the person controlling them should reassess the goals and priorities of the robots.

Also the girl in the picture (one of three presenting) had an amazing voice. We all agreed she should be on radio or something, or a professional presenter. Mark and Zelijko gave awesome presentations too, and we all enjoyed some Friday evening rush hour traffic from Boston. It was great!

Mike Litchfield

A few days ago a new Microsoft Surface arrived to our labs. It is a great tool for user interaction studies. It’s surface material has a very pleasant non-stickiy textured feel to it.

Touch interactions on the Surface are recognized by multiple underlying infra-red cameras and transformed into user actions. The image is rendered by a projector located underneath the tabletop. The Surface is a really exciting user interface since it allows incredibly fast multi-touch and multi-user interactions. Not only can it detect the location of a finger on the tabletop, but also its orientation based on the shape of the infra-red blob.

We hope that this interface will allow researchers as well as students at UNH ECE to develop exciting new user experiences.

Oszkar

Apple recently unveiled one of its newest creations: a mouse that responds to gestures and finger movements instead of the usual clicks and scroll wheel that come standard on a regular mouse. Dubbed “Magic Mouse“, this mouse uses a special optical laser that can read movement on any surface. This means the user does not have to have a mouse pad; the Magic Mouse can be used on just about any surface. One of the best features of this mouse is that it allows the user to have many different mouse configurations in one. For example, a left handed person can configure the mouse so that right click will be on the left side of the mouse, which fits a left handed person better. The mouse allows its user to click and double click anywhere on the touch surface, as well as utilize a scroll function that is harnessed by dragging a finger along the surface of the mouse. Another great feature of this mouse is that it allows a user to hold down the control key on the keyboard and drag a finger along the touchpad to zoom in. The Magic Mouse also offers a “momentum scrolling” option, where the user can increase the scrolling speed of the mouse by dragging their finger faster or slower along the touchpad.

 Devin Mullen

As my colleagues Zeljko and Mike have already blogged about, we attended the 2009 Ubiquitous Computing Conference in Orlando, Florida. It was a very interesting gathering with some vanguard research topics. For me, the one-minute madness was a new and exciting experience. Poster authors have to present their research in a single minute. At prior conferences I observed two distinct classes of one-minute presentations: serious ones and funny ones. The purpose of the first class is obvious, while the second type tries to convince people to visit the poster stand by using some witty slides and usually an open question that would be answered at the time of visit. For this conference I decided to try my luck with the funny presentation. Here are my slides, so you can judge for yourself:

The following text accompanies the slides:

Slide2: Everyone likes to take fun vacation pictures.
Slide3: But an hour long slide show of these pictures might not be as much fun for your friends as it is for you.
Slide4: So how can you stop your friends from falling asleep? We propose a new storytelling environment which integrates 3 new technologies: GPS enabled smart phones, virtual globe applications and multitouch interaction.
Slide5: This environment could create a much more enjoyable user experience for your friends compared to a slide show. It might even be the killer app for multitouch!
Slide6: If you would like to know more about our research please come by to see our poster and hear about some much more serious applications.

Acknowledements to Hyomin Kim and Alex Vapirev for their great acting skills shown in the slides.

Here you can also see the layout of our poster. If you click on it, a larger view will appear.

Let me know if you have any comments on the presentation and poster. Thanks!

Oszkar

This summer, Oskar, Ankit, Professor Kun, and I had a poster submission accepted at the Ubicomp 2009 conference. Unfortunately Ankit could not make it, since he was back in India for school. The rest of us and Zeljko attended the conference. During the conference, there was a 2 hour period where Posters, Videos, and Demos were displayed. During this time, Oskar and I, stood by the poster and presented our project to any interested attendees, and there were plenty. Zeljko stood nearby at his own poster. It was a great learning experience, to interact with the other researchers and present our work to them. The other attendees also had some good advice on other areas our project could be applied, or projects with similar goals that might be helpful. Oskar and I also took turns ‘manning the post(er)’ so that we could each see the other projects on display. Below is a picture of an interested researcher at our poster.

Overall, the conference was really awesome, and it was great to experience both the research presentations and community.

Mike Litchfield

A friend of mine has recently linked me to this interesting multi-touch video (see below). The video depicts a multi-touch project done by Felipe Gomes, an intern at Mozilla who has integrated Windows 7’s multi-touch features with Mozilla’s Firefox web browser. Also, if you haven’t done so already, take a look at some of the multi-touch work Mike, Ankit, and Oszkar have done here at Project54.

Multitouch on Firefox from Felipe on Vimeo.

Mark Taipan

For the majority summer, the bulk of my work on the multi-touch table has been working with Ankit and Oskar on the Google Earth application, in which we have overlayed geotagged photos with additional orientation data as 3-D models. We have added the ability to control the Google Earth application with the multi-touch table using different gesture we’ve designed. We will be using this application in an experiment that will compare two methods of storytelling, one using the Google Earth application and the other using a traditional picture slideshow with an additional map. The purpose of this is to explore the advantages of the overlayed photos as well as the application on the multi-touch table.

We have recently submitted the project as a poster and short paper submission to the Ubicomp 2009 conference and it has been accepted. The conference will be held in Orlando,Fla at the end of September. Below is a video that Ankit and I created to go along with the short paper/poster submission.

Mike Litchfield

I came across this research paper on ACM. The CityWall project places a multitouch screen on a shop window for people passing by to interact with. The study focuses on the ways the users approach, participate and interact with the display in public. Specifically, they looked at the dynamics of the approach (noticing the display,stepwise approach), interacting at the display with others (parallel use, teamwork and playful activities, conflict management), and transitions between participants and activities (floor and turn-taking, expressive and pondering gestures, concluding actions).

The CityWall project was setup in a 2.5 meter wide shop window between the main bus and train stations which are used by 400,000 passengers a day.

Data was recorded as the program logged the touches and content used, and a web camera faced downward toward the street and screen from the sunshade above the shop.

They found that the wall served as a stage for strangers to come into contact. The size of the display supported bodily interactions, making it possible for users to be expressive towards each other. This project makes it clear how the public availability of the screen and its objects create tension between personal space and action and public resources.

Here is a video of the project.

Mike Litchfield

In this paper, a study was conducted to analyze the benefits of using both  touch and pen interactions in the same application. They focused on the advantages and disadvantages of using the touch and pen in both the dominant hand and non-dominant hand in different applications, trying to combine the positive qualities of each input method and avoid the negative qualities. They were able to deduce the best setup from previous studies. They then created a paint application to test this setup with the different bimanual tasks.

This is a photo of one part of the application. The non-dominant hand uses touch to select color or tools, and the dominant hand uses the pen to draw (due to its increased precision). Many tools were created for this interaction setup for this application, such as bringing up menus, toggling between free-form drawing and straight line drawing, undoing drawing segments, selecting specific colors, and copying and pasting.

They also conducted an interesting experiment with a maze and three different combinations of inputs to finish the maze.

In the end it was found that the pen and touch combination of inputs exceeds the other types (pen and pen, touch and touch) in terms of speed, accuracy, and user preference, making it superior for these applications.

Mike Litchfield