Gianluca Quercini

Virtual institutions for preserving and simulating the culture of Mount Bego's ancient people

The Alps of southeastern France, better known as the Valley of Marvels, hide an impressive collection of engravings, mostly visible on the rocks around Mount Bego, which are irreplaceable witnesses of what life of the people who created them looked like. This calls for immediate action on promoting the awareness of this cultural treasure, which is hardly accessible by interested common men, as well as on helping domain experts to analyze these engravings and share their understanding and theories about them with other experts and the public. In this position paper, we propose a set of technologies (some of which are partially implemented) for digital preservation of available data about the region. Our technology will allow domain experts to: (i) organize and structure data into an existing collaborative tool set, (2) process it, (3) make assumptions about the way of life of the ancient people based on the data, (4) make the results of such activities available in form of 3D Virtual Worlds.

Attention-Aware Cultural Heritage Applications on Mobile Phones

In this paper we report a set of results extracted from our experience in using PDAs and 3G multimedia cellular phones in Cultural Heritage (CH) through projects covering an activity spanning 10 years. In particular, we focus on a interesting variant of context-awareness, namely attention-awareness, derived from our more recent ICT European project, named Agamemnon. Such concepts are essential to the development of next generation mobile applications in cultural heritage and in other comparable fields. We present an experiment tackling this new issue by exploiting image recognition technology and we deeply analyze advantages and drawbacks of this approach, showing some preliminary results.

Visualizing and Managing Network Topologies via Rectangular Dualization

Rectangular dualization is an effective, hierarchically oriented visualization method for network topologies and can be used in many other problems having in common with networks the condition that objects and their interoccurring relations are represented by means of a planar graph. However, only 4-connected triangulated planar graphs admit a rectangular dual. In this paper we present a linear time algorithm to optimally construct a rectangular layout for a general class of graphs and we discuss a variety of application fields where this approach represents an helpful support for visualization tools.

Text Entry in PDAs with WtX

Size is a mixed blessing for portable devices. While they feature a wide range of applications and services that can be used anywhere and anytime, their user interface is poor, hampered by the screen size. Furthermore, portable devices are meant to be used everywhere, even in uncomfortable situations (while standing up or walking for instance). Consequently, some tasks get hard to be accomplished. One of them is text entry, which is still far from being as comfortable as on desktop PCs. Different solutions have been envisaged, including small hardware keyboards, software (also called virtual) keyboards, predictive input techniques and handwriting recognition systems. In this paper we give a thorough overview of our text entry tool Word Tree version X (WtX), especially focusing on recent improvements. The new version of WtX features a handwriting recognition system and a mechanism (which we called First-Third-Last rule or simply FTL rule) forcing users to insert the characters of a word so as to improve text prediction.

Developing Attention-Aware and Context-Aware User Interfaces on Handheld Devices

In today’s modern societies the lack of computers feared by Asimov is not an imminent danger thanks to the advance of mobile technology in the last two decades. According to several market surveys, sales of handheld devices, especially smartphones, are growing at an incredibly fast rate and are expected to exceed those of any other electronic device by the end of 2011 1. This success is far from surprising, as today’s handheld devices feature high computational power and provide a wide range of applications that go beyond the traditional use of a phone. Examples are mHealth, a term coined by Istepanian et al. (2005) that refers to the use of mobile applications in healthcare, and augmented reality, defined by Azuma (1997) as a variation of virtual reality that “allows the user to see the real world, with virtual objects superimposed upon or composited with the real world”. Essentially, handheld devices fit in a pocket and provide most of the functionalities of a bulky computer. Their small size, however, is a mixed blessing, as it imposes serious limitations on usability, which is the focus of this chapter. In particular, we discuss two important aspects of the interaction with handheld devices, namely context-awareness and text entry.