We would be pleased to welcome you at this event.

Abstract:

Large touch tables have great potential for co-located collaboration because of their ability to track multiple inputs simultaneously. However, the multi-user experience on these devices can be enriched significantly if touch points can be associated with the user performing an action. When the user’s identity is readily available, there are many new opportunities for systems deployed in multi-user scenarios. For example, multiple users can operate applications in different modes at the same time or the appearance of the interface can change to provide automatic translations or help cues for novice users. In my talk I will give an overview on different techniques and I will present a non-intrusive, high-accuracy technique for mapping touches to their corresponding user in a collaborative environment named Carpus.

By mounting a high-resolution camera above the interactive surface, we are able to extract unique features from the back of the user’s hands, from all hand postures that are common during the practical use of multi-touch systems. Carpus supports walk-up-and-use scenarios in which every touch can be identified transparently. Our system therefore enables an entire new range of applications in which the user’s identity is needed. For example, we envision interactive setups in shops in order for customers to get more information about products. Carpus could be used in this scenario to track the users’ interests over different sessions and suggest them other relevant products in which he might be interested in.

Bio:

Johannes Schöning is a professor of computer science with a focus on HCI at Hasselt University, working within the Expertise centre for Digital Media (EDM) – the ICT research institute of Hasselt University. In addition he is a visiting lecturer at UCL London within the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Cities. These web pages are intended to give you an overview on his academic activities.

Before that Johannes worked in industry and at the Innovative Retail Laboratory of the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Saarbrücken. During his time at DFKI he received a PhD in computer science at Saarland University (2010) and a Master in Geoinformatics at the University of Münster at the Institute for Geoinformatics (2007). For his PhD he was awarded with the Vodafone Research Advancement Award.

Johannes Schönings research interests are new methods and novel interfaces to mainly navigate through spatial information. In general he develops, design and tests user interfaces that help people to solve daily tasks more effectively. This includes the development of mobile augmented reality applications, interactive surfaces and tabletops and other “Post-Desktop” interfaces.

We will present two Works-In-Progress:

• Blended Shelf: Reality-based Presentation and Exploration of Library Collections
  Kleiner, Eike; Rädle, Roman; Reiterer, Harald
  
• Encouraging Collaboration in Hybrid Therapy Games for Autistic Children
  Marwecki, Sebastian; Rädle, Roman; Reiterer, Harald

one contribution to the Doctoral Consortium:

• Design and Evaluation of Proxemics-Aware Environments to Support Navigation in Large Information Spaces
  Rädle, Roman

and two workshop contributions :

• Blended Interaction as an Approach for Holistic Control Room Design
  Butscher, Simon; Mueller, Jens; Schwarz, Tobias; Reiterer, Harald
• Self-Organizing User Interfaces: Envisioning the Future of Ubicomp UIs
  Jetter, Hans-Christian; Reiterer, Harald

We are looking forward to an exciting conference in Paris!

Dr. Uta Hinrichs will talk about “Open-Ended Information Exploration in Exhibition Spaces: A Case for Visualization & Large Display Technology”. For more information on this event see also http://www.inf.uni-konstanz.de/gk/teaching/db_colloq/abstract.php?table=TALK&id=246.

The talk of Dr. Miguel Nacenta is entiteled “Perceptual-spatial Factors in the Design of Collaborative Interactive Displays”. To get more information about this talk visit http://www.inf.uni-konstanz.de/gk/teaching/db_colloq/abstract.php?table=TALK&id=245.

We would be pleased to welcome you at this event.

We are looking forward to an interesting conference!

Prof. Dr. Harald Reiterer will give a talk entitled Blended Library on November 15th, 2012 at the World Usability Day 2012 (WUD) in Hannover. The talk will be at 5 pm. It covers our vision of the Blended Library and will unfold current findings of the research project.

We encourage you to visit the WUD in Hannover and, especially, attend the Blended Library talk.

Prof. Dr. Harald Reiterer will give a keynote talk on September 13th, 2012 at the Kongress Bibliothek Information Schweiz (BIS) in Konstanz. The event is going to be at the Konzilgebäude in Konstanz and the keynote Positionierung der Bibliothek im digitalen Zeitalter? will start at 09:00 a.m. at the Oberer Saal (capacity 400 people).

We would be pleased to welcome you at this event.

Prof. Harald Reiterer will give an invited Talk about “Positionierung der Bibliothek im digitalen Zeitalter (Positioning of the Library in the digital age)” on Thursday 13 Sept 2012 at BIS Conference in Konstanz. The BIS Conference is the meeting of the Swiss Libraries. More information about the Conference and the program are available here: http://www.bis.info/kongress/kongress-2012-vorschau/menu-id-98.html

Our group contributes two papers and co-organizes a workshop at the NordiCHI 2012 conference which will take place from October 14th to October 17th in Copenhagen, Denmark. NordiCHI is the main Nordic forum for human-computer interaction research, with the conference proceedings published by ACM. The 7th NordiCHI conference is hosted by the IT University Copenhagen.

Florian Geyer will present a full paper on:
IdeaVis: A Hybrid Workspace and Interactive Visualization for Paper-based Collaborative Sketching Sessions.
and a short paper on:
Harnessing the Benefits of Bimanual and Multi-finger Input for Supporting Grouping Tasks on Interactive Tabletops

Further, we are looking forward to our workshop on Proxemics in Human-Computer Interaction!