Our group will present one full paper entitled Designing Reality-Based Interfaces for Creative Group Work at the 8th ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference that will take place at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, USA from 3rd to 6th November 2011.
We are also proud and honored that our contribution was nominated for the Best Contribution to Creative Communication Award.

Started in 1993, the biannual ACM Creativity & Cognition (C&C) conference series brings together artists and scientists, designers and educators, researchers and practitioners. This year’s theme is Creativity and Technology. Our contribution is a full paper on our research in supporting collaborative design activities with reality-based and tangible interfaces. Based on an observational study grounded in the realitybased interaction framework, we identified power vs. reality tradeoffs that can be addressed to find a close fit to embodied design practice. Using this knowledge, we designed and implemented a digital workspace for supporting affinity diagramming. Its hybrid interaction techniques combine digital pen & paper with an interactive table and tangible tokens. An additional vertical display is used to support reflection-in-action and for enhancing discussion and coordination. A preliminary user study confirmed the applicability of our tradeoffs and the general acceptance of the tool design.
We look forward to an interesting conference and an exiting conference venue!

A video of our prototype implementation is availabe online:

About Facet-Streams:

Facet-Streams is a prototype application for the Microsoft Surface tabletop computer. The application enables a group of users (e.g. a family) to simultaneously search hotels in the hotel data of HolidayCheck and to agree on a holiday destination. Users can use multitouch and glass tokens to enter their individual preferences into the application.

“Facet-Streams” was designed and implemented by Hans-Christian Jetter, Jens Gerken und Michael Zöllner at the Human-Computer Interaction Group of Prof. Dr. Harald Reiterer at the University of Konstanz in cooperation with Natasa Milic-Frayling of the Integrated Systems Group of Microsoft Research Cambridge.

Quote from the mail of the “Best of CHI” committee:

Congratulations!  On behalf of SIGCHI and the CHI 2011 Committee, we would like to formally notify you that your accepted Paper has received an “Honorable Mention” award.  The CHI 2011 Papers and Notes Committee selected only the top 5% of Papers and Notes submissions to receive the “Honorable Mention” designation.  Quite an achievement. [...] Congratulations to you all and thank you for advancing the field of Human-Computer Interaction! [...]

Now that’s a really nice way to say thank you!

In the light of this award, we are happy that our submissions to CHI 2011 were even more successful than we already knew…

About ZOIL:

ZOIL (Zoomable Object-Oriented Information Landscape) is a software framework written in C# for the .NET 4.0/WPF platform. ZOIL’s development is part of a research project at the Human-Computer Interaction Group of the University of Konstanz (http://hci.uni-konstanz.de/permaedia) .

It makes use of different external frameworks and APIs, e.g. Versant’s db4objects (db4o) object database and the Microsoft Surface SDK, to enable application programmers to easily provide a large zoomable visual workspace in their applications. This visual workspace in form of a zoomable information landscape has following properties that make ZOIL particularly interesting for natural and post-WIMP interaction in multi-user, multi-display and multi-device work environments for tangible and ubiquitous computing:

• Semantic Zooming – For each object in the information landscape multiple size-dependent representations can be defined. While zooming in, an object can smoothly change its form, content, and nature.
• Persistent – The information landscape has a data model that can be persisted and shared across devices using a client-server architecture based on Versant’s db4o.
• Distributed and Real-Time Synchronized – The information landscape’s data model is synchronized in real-time across devices using a a client-server architecture based on Versant’s db4o. This enables multi-user and multi-device scenarios, in which multiple collocated or remote devices and users synchronously collaborate inside a single workspace.

Find more details at http://zoil.codeplex.com