2010

Die Siemens AG - Corporate Technology (User Interface Design) sucht im Rahmen der Kooperation mit der Arbeitsgruppe Mensch-Computer Interaktion in Konstanz zwei studentische Mitarbeiter/innen.

Bei Interesse und für weiterführende Informationen melden Sie sich bitte bei Herrn Tobias Schwarz (089 636-49653) schwarz.tobias.ext@siemens.com.

In "Minority Report" steuert Tom Cruise per Hand-Gesten durch virtuelle Aktenberge. Science-Fiction-Filme greifen technische Entwicklungen oft phantasievoll vorweg. Aber wie nah sind sie an der Realität? Wir haben uns in zwei Forschungslaboren nach dem Computer-Interface der Zukunft umgesehen

Harald Reiterer hält an der University of Twente einen Vortrag zum Thema "Blended Interaction - Blending real and computer-based Interaction". Der Vortrag findet innerhalb eines Symposiums statt, das im Rahmen der Verteidigung der Dissertation "Gesture Interaction at a Distance" von Wim Fikkert abgehalten wird.

Aufgrund einer Konferenz in der ersten Woche des Semesters beginnen unsere Vorlesungen und Seminare in der Woche vom 19.04.2010.

Die Vorbesprechung für Seminare, Praktika und Vorlesungen der Arbeitsgruppe HCI findet am 21.04. im Raum C252 statt. Uhrzeit 12:00 - 14:00. Wenn Sie sich für eine oder mehrere unserer Veranstaltungen interessieren, ist dies eine gute Gelegenheit, mehr Details zu erfahren. Eine Übersicht über angebotene Vorlesungen findet sich bereits auf dieser Webseite. 

Medizinische Bilddaten, z.B. Computertomographie- oder Kernspintomographiedaten, werden in der radiologischen Diagnostik und in der Planung chirurgischer Eingriffe genutzt. Nachdem leistungsfähige Algorithmen zur Darstellung dieser Bilddaten entwickelt worden, rücken Fragen der Mensch-Computer-Interaktion mehr und mehr in den Fokus, weil sie letztlich über den praktischen Erfolg entscheiden. Beginnend mit dem Requirements Engineering (welche Informationen benötigt ein Chirurg tatsächlich, um seine Strategie festzulegen?) und basalen 3D-Interaktionen (3D-Rotation, Vermessung räumlicher Zusammenhänge) bis hin zu problemspezifischen Anpassungen werden diese Fragen diskutiert. Die Planung von Operationen im Bereich der Hals-Nasen-Ohren-Chirurgie und der Leberchirurgie dienen dabei als Fallbeispiele. Es soll dabei auch deutlich werden, dass Therapieentscheidungen teilweise kollaborativ gefällt werden, z.B. in einem interdisziplinär besetzten Tumorboard und dass sich die Bedürfnisse und Fähigkeiten der beteiligten Arztgruppen, z.B. Radiologen und Chirurgen in wichtigen Details unterscheiden.

Web/Url: http://isgwww.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/~bernhard/

Dr. Thomas Memmel berichtet im Rahmen der Lehrveranstaltung Mensch-Computer Interaktion vom Berufsalltag eines Usability Engineers und Interaction Designers bei der Zühlke Engineering AG anhand ausgewählter Projekte und Aktivitäten.

PocketBee is a multi-modal diary tool that allows researchers to remotely collect rich and in-depth data in the field. Based on the Android smart-phone platform, we especially focused on an easy to use user interface. In our ongoing cooperation project with the Customer Research Center, Daimler AG we explore how such a diary tool can enhance research studies in the automotive sector, especially in situations, where participants are given cars and it is impossible for a researcher to be on site all the time.

Some notes about the underlying concept: Core questions serve as cognitive triggers for pre-defined events. Multiple modalities allow participants to compose notes in the most appropriate and convenient way. Instant network synchronization allows researchers to view and analyze the data on-the-fly while also being able to create new tasks or questionnaires during an ongoing study. These can also be linked to certain trigger events, such as time and date. Thereby, Pocket Bee supports diary and Experience Sampling (ESM) studies. The system was developed in a user-centered design process.

Prof. Dr. Patrick Baudisch von der Human-Computer Interaction Group am Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam wird unsere Arbeitsgruppe besuchen und einen Vortrag im Rahmen der "Dies Academicus" halten. Sein Vortrag hat den Titel: „My new PC is a mobile phone“.

Web/Url: http://www.patrickbaudisch.com/

Die Vorbesprechung für Seminare, Praktika und Vorlesungen der Arbeitsgruppe HCI findet am 20.10. im Raum D210 statt. Uhrzeit 12:00 - 13:00. Wenn Sie sich für eine oder mehrere unserer Veranstaltungen interessieren, ist dies eine gute Gelegenheit, mehr Details zu erfahren. 

Last week, on October 18th, PocketBee was presented at the 6th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, the nordiCHI conference, in Reykjavik, Iceland. The talk was very well received and the according paper can be found here. A video showing the system is also available on vimeo.

If you are interested to know more about PocketBee, please contact us. We are currently exploring ways to make the system available to the community.

Today a crew from 3sat neues has been filming some footage for a report about Tablets, such as the iPad, in our Media Room lab. We were asked to state our opinion about some of the newest available devices and identify which aspects are done well and which might impair the user experience. Prof.  Dr. Harald Reiterer also gave a short interview about the impact of Tablets and the challenges for designers and end-users.

The broadcasting date is already set: 3sat will show this neues episode on Sunday, 14th of November, 16:30 CET. The title of the program will be “Es ist serviert – der Tablet Trend”.

Thanks to the filming crew, who made this a fun experience for us!

Tomorrow afternoon, five of our group will start our trip to Saarbrücken to attend the 5th ACM Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces (ITS) conference. The ITS, despite being around for only 5 years now, is already one of the top conferences when it comes to reality-based interaction and tangible interfaces in general. Florian Geyer, Hans-Christian Jetter, Stephan Huber, Jens Gerken, and Prof. Harald Reiterer will represent our group at the conference.While we didn’t submit any fullpapers we will present four posters of our recent work – so if you want to chat with us, just visit the poster session on Monday evening.

Prof. Reiterer wird einen Vortrag zum Thema "Blended Library - mögliche neue Einsatzformen von IKT im Bibliotheksbereich" an der Universitätsbibliothek Stuttgart halten. Der Vortrag findet im Rahmen des Workshops "Der Katalog der Zukunft (Teil 3)" in der Bibliothek der Universität Stuttgart statt.

Web/Url: http://www.vdb-online.org/veranstaltungen/522/

Dass in der Automotive Branche gewaltige Veränderungen bevorstehen, ist kein Geheimnis. Produktinnovationen müssen in kürzester Zeit zu marktreifen Produkten entwickelt werden. Dieses gelingt nur durch die optimale Beherrschung der Abläufe und Verfügbarkeit der Daten entlang der Prozesskette von der ersten Idee bis zum Auslauf eines Produktes – und dieses in einem globalen Netzwerk von Unternehmen. Was verbirgt sich hinter Product-Life-Cycle Management? Welche Bedeutung hat dieses Thema für die Unternehmen und wie kann IT dabei optimal unterstützen? Erfahren Sie mehr darüber - aus erster Hand von Unternehmen, die in diesem Bereich Vorreiter sind.

Tablet-PCs sind seit dem Erfolg von Apples iPad auf dem Weg zum Massenmarkt-tauglichen Produkt. Doch die Geräteklasse der Tablets ist noch sehr neu, in ihren Möglichkeiten liegen sie irgendwo zwischen Laptop und Smartphone. Was ist ein stimmiges Konzept, was das ultimative Erfolgsgeheimnis? An der Universität Konstanz beschäftigt man sich mit grundlegender Forschung zum Thema Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion. Der Tablet-Trend ist daher für die Forscher gefundenes Fressen. Wir haben Professor Harald Reiterer, Doktorand Jens Gerken und Master-Student Toni Schmitt auf die Finger geschaut.

Eine Ausstellung über den Nutzen und Nachteil des Telefons für das Leben.

So we are back from ITS and enjoyed a great and inspiring conference. While the program was quite tight we enjoyed it being a single-track conference which allowed us to listen to all the talks and not having to choose all the time. Next to the talks there was also a great demo and poster session on Monday evening with some very impressive demonstrations. The conference dinner on Tuesday, with a short guided tour through the Völklinger Hütte in advance, was also an experience. We uploaded some pictures to flickr, which you can find here.

As there were quite a lot of interesting talks and demos, we decided to pick a few highlights and outline these here.

• So first of all, there was the Best Paper: The awards were given in the closing session and the best paper was handed to “Proxemic Interaction: Designing for a Proximity and Orientation-Aware Environment” by Till Ballendat et al. from LMU/University of Calgary. The paper is about bringing spatial relationship between humans and also computers more into consideration in order to come closer to the vision of ubiquitous computing. The paper outlines which aspects can have an impact on proxemic interaction and show some inspiring use cases. The video can be found here on youtube.
• The Best Note and also the Best Demo was handed to “Mudpad: Tactile Feedback and Haptic Texture Overlay for Touch Surfaces“. This paper also illustrates that ITS focuses not only on conceptual work and empirical studies  but also on technological innovations, such as this work by Yvonne Jansen et al. from Aachen. They tried to tackle the problem of the missing haptic feedback when using touch screens by using “an array of electromagnets combined with an overlay containing magnetorheological (MR) fluid to actuate a tablet-sized area”. Very interesting and cool approach which also attracted lots of people in the demo area 
• Another highlight was the talk by Andy Wilson from Microsoft Research about the use of depth cameras: “Using a Depth Camera as a Touch Sensor“. While he illustrated, as the title suggests, how to use a depth camera to identify touch points with a Surface (with quite impressive accuracy) he also gave quite a few hints towards the possibilities for use of the Microsoft Kinect system. While a complete open SDK should not be expected, it seems that Microsoft won’t really bother with hacked drivers. We are currently already playing around with our Kinect system that arrived last Thursday and we’ll see, where we can get with that. The depth cameras open up a whole new space for us as interaction designers, which I think we will probably see more of next year UIST and ITS.

A few other interesting talks and demos in the short:

• Cool Interaction with Calm Technologies – Experimenting with Ice as a Multitouch Surface (Virolainen et al., Nokia Research)
• Towards a Formalization of Multi-touch Gestures (Kammer et al., TU Dresden)
• Novel Fields of Application for Tangible Displays Above the Tabletop (Spindler et al., Magdeburg University)
• Xpaaand: Interacting with Rollable Displays (Khalilbeigi et al., TU Darmstadt)
• E-Science on the Surface (Bartindale et al., Newcastle University)

The closing keynote by Yvonne Rogers was also very interesting, as she gave a great overview of the field of tabletop research. She already started in 1999 with building tabletops and exploring the way how people use them and it was really inspiring to see, how far the research and real world applications have come today (and perhaps this shows the time has come to move one…?).

Last but not least, the ITS website by the DFKI is a great resource for all the papers and videos. We don’t know how long they will be able/allowed to keep it up, but until then, its the perfect place to revisit the conference.

 See you at next ITS in JAPAN!

On monday evening the interactive exhibition “Fernbeziehung” has been inaugurated and is now open to the public.

As a central point the exhibition presents a large-scale Multitouch Table which allows an collaborative information exploration. Up to six visitors can interact simultaneous with the digital accesible information presentations.

More information about the exhibition can be found here:

Fernbeziehung Website

“Fernbeziehung” on Facebook

Prof. Reiterer wird an der Universität Magdeburg einen Vortrag zum Thema "Blended Interaction - Neuen Formen der Mensch-Computer Interaktion" halten.

We are happy to announce that our ZOIL software framework has finally made its way to http://zoil.codeplex.com as an open source project under the BSD license. It is therefore also available for commercial purposes. Anyone with whom we shared a previous version of our ZOIL framework is advised to have a look at the improved and better documented release on http://zoil.codeplex.com.

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.

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

Dr. Werner König ist Senior Consultant für Interaktive Technologien bei der ict AT in Kohlberg, Deutschland. Er war bis März dieses Jahres ein Mitglied unserer Arbeitsgruppe. Sein Vortrag wird im Rahmen der Lehrveranstaltung "Blended Interaction" stattfinden. Hierbei wird er aufzeigen, inwieweit die Vision der Blended Interaction bereits die Forschungslabore verlassen hat und in realen Systemen zu finden ist, beispielsweise im Kontext von Messen oder Museen.

Web/Url: http://www.ict.de

The research goal of NiCE is to design, develop, and evaluate natural user interfaces. We mainly focus on novel large surfaces and new interaction techniques, which are embedded in our daily-life environment (e.g. living room, conference room, office environment etc.). In this presentation, we will present two projects, the NiCE Formula Editor and Sitz g’scheit. 
In the NiCE Formula Editor, we can recognize 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. 
In the project Sitz g’scheit, we present three different ways of interrupting people to posture guidance. We developed an ergonomically adjustable office chair equipped with four sensors measuring the office worker’s posture. It is important that users do some training after bad posture and be alerted of this; therefore, we implemented three different alert modalities (Digital Feedback, Physical Feedback, and Vibrotactile Feedback), with the goal to find out which of the techniques is the most effective interruption modality without causing a huge disruption effect. To measure the task-performance, we conducted a formal user study. 

Bio:

Michael Haller is a professor at the department of Interactive Media of the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences (Hagenberg, Austria), head of the Media Interaction Lab (www.mi-lab.org), head of the Austrian Research Center NiCE, and responsible for computer graphics, human-computer interaction, and augmented reality. His core areas of expertise are visualization and interaction. He received Dipl.-Ing. (1997), Dr. techn. (2001), and Habilitation (2007) degrees from Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria. He is active in several research areas, including interactive computer graphics, augmented and virtual reality, and human computer interfaces. His current focus is on innovative interaction techniques and interfaces for next generation working environments. Currently, he leads a team of over 10 researchers and students. In 2004, he received the Erwin Schrödinger fellowship award presented by the Austrian Science Fund for his visit at the Human Interaction Technology Laboratory (HITLabNZ), University of Canterbury (New Zealand), and the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC), University of Southern California (USA). The research output includes 13 journal papers and book chapters, and has been presented already in high quality academic conferences and several demonstrations including ACM SIGGRAPH, Eurographics, Disney’s New Technology Forum, and Ars Electronica Festival. In 2006, he was also invited to exhibit his work for five years at the Singapore Science Center. Since 2008, Haller is head of the Austrian Research Studio NiCE, designing natural user interfaces for collaborative environments.

Web/Url: http://mi-lab.org/