Alexandre Topol

A VRML-based user interface for an online digitalized antiquarian collection

This paper presents a prototypal 3D application for the access to a digital library. It is mainly written in Java and relying on the 3D engine enclosed in a VRML browser. By describing the basic interactions we have included in our prototype and how they are implemented, we show that, with the actual Virtual Reality Modeling Language specification (VRML97) and even with the new Extented 3D (X3D) draft, it is too difficult to create some highly interactive virtual worlds. The effort needed to program basic behaviors with a script language raises some important problems. For solving them, we propose to work on adding some generic behavior nodes into the VRML specification.

Experimenting a 3D interface for the access to a digital library

We experiment the production of VRML scenes on the fly for the unguided browsing through a digitalized rare books collection. The physical appearance of books is captured by photographic textures in order to help the user evaluation of the collection relevance. In this preliminary work, we address the problems of 3D scenes dynamic specification and VRML browser response time for such scenes.

Binding browsing and reading activities in a 3D digital library

Browsing through digitalized books collections and reading activities are separated in most present WWW-based users interfaces of digital libraries. This context break induces longer apprenticeship and navigation time within the interface. We study in this paper how 3D interaction metaphors provide a continuous navigation space for these two tasks.

Immersion of Xwindow applications into a 3D workbench

The coexistence of 3D applications within 2D window managers is still difficult. We experiment a real-time immersion of Xwindow applications into a 3D scene and allow minimal interaction with them. We use the Xlib structures and routines to catch the position size, and graphical content of the widgets.

Experiments towards 3d immersive interaction for digital libraries

We describe in this paper an experimental setting for browsing and reading simultaneously multiple digital documents. An hemispherical visualization device is used to immerge the reader into 3D representations of digital collections.

Digitization and 3D modeling of movable books

Movable books provide interesting challenges for digitization and user interface design. We report in this paper some preliminary results in the building of a 3D visualization workbench for such books

A public 3d visualization tool for the musée des arts et métiers de paris

Useful and durable knowledge can be built upon the experience of discovering and the construction of a contextual awareness. In this article we present a tool to browse a catalog of 3D objects taken from the Musee des arts et metiers de Paris. The purpose of this multimedia kiosk is to enhance the visit experience by helping users to built meaningful relations between objects and scientific fields. Users select subjects of interest during the visit by collecting cards placed beside the real objects in the museums galleries. The cards are tagged with reactvision fiducial marks that enable the user to manipulate the 3D object representation on the screen. We present this tool and we focus more precisely on interaction issues both for individuals and groups in a public context and for a private use at home.

Extensible sound description in COLLADA: a unique file for a rich sound design

Most standard scene description languages include a sound description and factorize common elements needed by the description of visual and auditory information. Both aspects are described with the same coordinate system for example. However, as soon as a dynamic description or external data are required, this benefit is lost and all the glue must be done by a programming solution that does not fit designers or authors usual skills. In this paper we address this problem and propose a solution to give back to designers the bigger role even when the scene is dynamic or based on procedural synthesizers. This solution is based on the COLLADA file format in which we have added sound support, scripting capabilities and external extensions. The use of this augmented COLLADA language is illustrated through the creation of a dynamic urban soundscape.

AZ66: How Can We Play with Emotions?

Since the early 90s, affective computing researches have mainly been focused on emotions recognition and less on original entertainment contents that could be proposed. We present a prototype resulting from the association of a physiological sensing device with an original game.

Fluid interaction for the document in context

We explore in this paper the interface requirements for users navigation within a mixed collection of 3D digitalized objects and textual documents. A specific application is history of technology where 3D and 2D documents are most of the time inter-related.