M. Sheelagh T. Carpendale

Collaborative coupling over tabletop displays

Designing collaborative interfaces for tabletops remains difficult because we do not fully understand how groups coordinate their actions when working collaboratively over tables. We present two observational studies of pairs completing independent and shared tasks that investigate collaborative coupling, or the manner in which collaborators are involved and occupied with each others work. Our results indicate that individuals frequently and fluidly engage and disengage with group activity through several distinct, recognizable states with unique characteristics. We describe these states and explore the consequences of these states for tabletop interface design.

Shallow-depth 3d interaction: design and evaluation of one-, two- and three-touch techniques

On traditional tables, people frequently use the third dimension to pile, sort and store objects. However, while effective and informative for organization, this use of the third dimension does not usually extend far above the table. To enrich interaction with digital tables, we present the concept of shallow-depth 3D -- 3D interaction with limited depth. Within this shallow-depth 3D environment several common interaction methods need to be reconsidered. Starting from any of one, two and three touch points, we present interaction techniques that provide control of all types of 3D rotation coupled with translation (6DOF) on a direct-touch tabletop display. The different techniques exemplify a wide range of interaction possibilities: from the one-touch technique, which is designed to be simple and natural, but inherits a degree of imprecision from its simplicity; through to three-touch interaction, which allows precise bimanual simultaneous control of multiple degrees of freedom, but at the cost of simplicity. To understand how these techniques support interaction in shallow-depth 3D, we present a user study that examines the efficiency of, and preferences for, the techniques developed. Results show that users are fastest and most accurate when using the three-touch technique and that their preferences were also strongly in favour of the expressive power available from three-touch.

Bubble Sets: Revealing Set Relations with Isocontours over Existing Visualizations

While many data sets contain multiple relationships, depicting more than one data relationship within a single visualization is challenging. We introduce Bubble Sets as a visualization technique for data that has both a primary data relation with a semantically significant spatial organization and a significant set membership relation in which members of the same set are not necessarily adjacent in the primary layout. In order to maintain the spatial rights of the primary data relation, we avoid layout adjustment techniques that improve set cluster continuity and density. Instead, we use a continuous, possibly concave, isocontour to delineate set membership, without disrupting the primary layout. Optimizations minimize cluster overlap and provide for calculation of the isocontours at interactive speeds. Case studies show how this technique can be used to indicate multiple sets on a variety of common visualizations.

VisLink: Revealing Relationships Amongst Visualizations

We present VisLink, a method by which visualizations and the relationships between them can be interactively explored. VisLink readily generalizes to support multiple visualizations, empowers inter-representational queries, and enables the reuse of the spatial variables, thus supporting efficient information encoding and providing for powerful visualization bridging. Our approach uses multiple 2D layouts, drawing each one in its own plane. These planes can then be placed and re-positioned in 3D space: side by side, in parallel, or in chosen placements that provide favoured views. Relationships, connections, and patterns between visualizations can be revealed and explored using a variety of interaction techniques including spreading activation and search filters.

A Visual Backchannel for Large-Scale Events

We introduce the concept of a Visual Backchannel as a novel way of following and exploring online conversations about large-scale events. Microblogging communities, such as Twitter, are increasingly used as digital backchannels for timely exchange of brief comments and impressions during political speeches, sport competitions, natural disasters, and other large events. Currently, shared updates are typically displayed in the form of a simple list, making it difficult to get an overview of the fast-paced discussions as it happens in the moment and how it evolves over time. In contrast, our Visual Backchannel design provides an evolving, interactive, and multi-faceted visual overview of large-scale ongoing conversations on Twitter. To visualize a continuously updating information stream, we include visual saliency for what is happening now and what has just happened, set in the context of the evolving conversation. As part of a fully web-based coordinated-view system we introduce Topic Streams, a temporally adjustable stacked graph visualizing topics over time, a People Spiral representing participants and their activity, and an Image Cloud encoding the popularity of event photos by size. Together with a post listing, these mutually linked views support cross-filtering along topics, participants, and time ranges. We discuss our design considerations, in particular with respect to evolving visualizations of dynamically changing data. Initial feedback indicates significant interest and suggests several unanticipated uses.

Gestures in the wild: studying multi-touch gesture sequences on interactive tabletop exhibits

In this paper we describe our findings from a field study that was conducted at the Vancouver Aquarium to investigate how visitors interact with a large interactive table exhibit using multi-touch gestures. Our findings show that the choice and use of multi-touch gestures are influenced not only by general preferences for certain gestures but also by the interaction context and social context they occur in. We found that gestures are not executed in isolation but linked into sequences where previous gestures influence the formation of subsequent gestures. Furthermore, gestures were used beyond the manipulation of media items to support social encounters around the tabletop exhibit. Our findings indicate the importance of versatile many-to-one mappings between gestures and their actions that, other than one-to-one mappings, can support fluid transitions between gestures as part of sequences and facilitate social information exploration.

VisGets: Coordinated Visualizations for Web-based Information Exploration and Discovery

In common Web-based search interfaces, it can be difficult to formulate queries that simultaneously combine temporal, spatial, and topical data filters. We investigate how coordinated visualizations can enhance search and exploration of information on the World Wide Web by easing the formulation of these types of queries. Drawing from visual information seeking and exploratory search, we introduce VisGets - interactive query visualizations of Web-based information that operate with online information within a Web browser. VisGets provide the information seeker with visual overviews of Web resources and offer a way to visually filter the data. Our goal is to facilitate the construction of dynamic search queries that combine filters from more than one data dimension. We present a prototype information exploration system featuring three linked VisGets (temporal, spatial, and topical), and used it to visually explore news items from online RSS feeds.

Sticky tools: full 6DOF force-based interaction for multi-touch tables

Tabletop computing techniques are using physically familiar force-based interactions to enable compelling interfaces that provide a feeling of being embodied with a virtual object. We introduce an interaction paradigm that has the benefits of force-based interaction complete with full 6DOF manipulation. Only multi-touch input, such as that provided by the Microsoft Surface and the SMART Table, is necessary to achieve this interaction freedom. This paradigm is realized through sticky tools: a combination of sticky fingers, a physically familiar technique for moving, spinning, and lifting virtual objects; opposable thumbs, a method for flipping objects over; and virtual tools, a method for propagating behaviour to other virtual objects in the scene. We show how sticky tools can introduce richer meaning to tabletop computing by drawing a parallel between sticky tools and the discussion in Urp [20] around the meaning of tangible devices in terms of nouns, verbs, reconfigurable tools, attributes, and pure objects. We then relate this discussion to other force-based interaction techniques by describing how a designer can introduce complexity in how people can control both physical and virtual objects, how physical objects can control both physical and virtual objects, and how virtual objects can control virtual objects.

Edgelens: an interactive method for managing edge congestion in graphs

An increasing number of tasks require people to explore, navigate and search extremely complex data sets visualized as graphs. Examples include electrical and telecommunication networks, Web structures, and airline routes. The problem is that graphs of these real world data sets have many interconnected nodes, ultimately leading to edge congestion: the density of edges is so great that they obscure nodes, individual edges, and even the visual information beneath the graph. To address this problem we developed an interactive technique called EdgeLens. An EdgeLens interactively curves graph edges away for a persons focus attention without changing the node positions. This opens up sufficient space to disambiguate node and edge relationships and to see underlying information while still preserving node layout. Initially two methods of creating this interaction were developed and compared in a user study. The results of this study were used in the selection of a basic approach and the subsequent development of the EdgeLens. We then improved the EdgeLens through use of transparency and colour and by allowing multiple lenses to appear on the graph.

Docuburst: visualizing document content using language structure

Textual data is at the forefront of information management problems today. One response has been the development of visualizations of text data. These visualizations, commonly based on simple attributes such as relative word frequency, have become increasingly popular tools. We extend this direction, presenting the first visualization of document content which combines word frequency with the human‐created structure in lexical databases to create a visualization that also reflects semantic content. DocuBurst is a radial, space‐filling layout of hyponymy (the IS‐A relation), overlaid with occurrence counts of words in a document of interest to provide visual summaries at varying levels of granularity. Interactive document analysis is supported with geometric and semantic zoom, selectable focus on individual words, and linked access to source text.