Moira C. Norrie

PaperPoint: a paper-based presentation and interactive paper prototyping tool

Recent developments in digital pen and paper solutions enable, not only the digital capture of handwriting, but also paper to be used as an interactive medium that links to digital information and services. We present a tool that builds on technologies for interactive paper to enable PowerPoint presentations to be controlled from printed slide handouts. Furthermore, slides can be easily annotated during presentations by simply drawing on the printed version of the slide. As well as discussing the advantages of such a paper-based interface and initial findings on its use, we describe how we were also able to exploit it to provide a general prototyping tool for interactive paper applications.

An Extended Entity-Relationship Approach to Data Management in Object-Oriented Systems

Database programming in object-oriented systems can be supported by combining data modelling and programming technologies such that a data model supports the management of collections of objects where those objects are as specified by the underlying object-oriented programming language. This approach is the basis of the object data management services (ODMS) of the Comandos system. The ODMS data model provides constructs for the representation of both entities and their relationships and further supports rich classification structures. To complement the structural model, there is an operational model based on an algebra over collections of objects.

Only touching the surface: creating affinities between digital content and paper

Despite the wide-ranging recognition that paper remains a pervasive resource for human conduct and collaboration, there has been uncertain progress in developing technologies to bridge the paper-digital divide. In this essay we discuss the design of a technology that interweaves developments in new materials, electronics and software, and seeks to provide a cheap and accessible solution to creating new affinities between digital content, in whatever form, and ordinary paper. The technology and its design draws from a broad range of field studies, including research in classrooms and museums. These delineate the requirements and considerations that inform solutions to enhancing paper whilst preserving its integrity. The paper also discusses a naturalistic experiment, an evaluation in a museum, where we assessed the technology and the solution. We also chart the progressive development of this solution and the ways in which seemingly simple actions and issues became reconstituted as highly complex technical and analytic problems.

Customizable collaborative editor relying on treeOPT algorithm

Research in collaborative editing tends to have been undertaken in isolation rather than as part of a general information or application infrastructure. Our goal is to develop a universal information platform that can support collaboration in a range of application domains. Since not all user groups have the same conventions and not all tasks have the same requirements, this implies that it should be possible to customize the collaborative editor at the level of both communities and individual tasks. One of the keys to customization is to use a structured rather than linear representation of documents that can be applied to both textual and graphical editors. In this paper, we propose the treeOPT (tree OPerational Transformation) algorithm that, relying on a tree representation of documents, applies the operational transformation mechanism recursively over the different document levels. Applications using this algorithm achieve better efficiency, the possibility of working at different granularity levels and improvements in the semantic consistency.

Interactive development of cross-device user interfaces

Current GUI builders provide a design environment for user interfaces that target either a single type or fixed set of devices, and provide little support for scenarios in which the user interface, or parts of it, are distributed over multiple devices. Distributed user interfaces have received increasing attention over the past years. There are different, often model-based, approaches that focus on technical issues. This paper presents XDStudio--a new GUI builder designed to support interactive development of cross-device web interfaces. XDStudio implements two complementary authoring modes with a focus on the design process of distributed user interfaces. First, simulated authoring allows designing for a multi-device environment on a single device by simulating other target devices. Second, on-device authoring allows the design process itself to be distributed over multiple devices, as design and development take place on the target devices themselves. To support interactive development for multi-device environments, where not all devices may be present at design and run-time, XDStudio supports switching between the two authoring modes, as well as between design and use modes, as required. This paper focuses on the design of XDStudio, and evaluates its support for two distribution scenarios.

iGesture: A General Gesture Recognition Framework

With the emergence of digital pen and paper interfaces, there is a need for gesture recognition tools for digital pen input. While there exists a variety of gesture recognition frameworks, none of them addresses the issues of supporting application developers as well as the designers of new recognition algorithms and, at the same time, can be integrated with new forms of input devices such as digital pens. We introduce iGesture, a Java-based gesture recognition framework focusing on extensibility and cross-application reusability by providing an integrated solution that includes tools for gesture recognition as well as the creation and management of gesture sets for the evaluation and optimisation of new or existing gesture recognition algorithms. In addition to traditional screen-based interaction, iGesture provides a digital pen and paper interface.

Paperproof: a paper-digital proof-editing system

We present PaperProof, a paper-digital proof-editing application that allows users to edit digital documents by means of gesture-based mark-up of their printed versions. This enables users to switch seamlessly back and forth between paper and digital instances of a document throughout the document lifecycle, working with whichever medium is preferred for a given task. Importantly, by maintaining a logical mapping between the printed and digital instances, editing operations on paper can later be integrated into the digital document even if other users have edited the digital version in parallel. The system is based on Anoto digital pen and paper technology and is implemented using the iPaper framework for interactive paper.

Print-n-link: weaving the paper web

Citations form the basis for a web of scientific publications. Search engines, embedded hyperlinks and digital libraries all simplify the task of finding publications of interest on the web and navigating to cited publications or web sites. However the actual reading of publications often takes place on paper and frequently on the move. We present a system Print-n-Link that uses technologies for interactive paper to enhance the reading process by enabling users to access digital information and/or searches for cited documents from a printed version of a publication using a digital pen for interaction. A special virtual printer driver automatically generates links from paper to digital services during the printing process based on an analysis of PDF documents. Depending on the user setting and interaction gesture, the system may retrieve metadata about the citation and inform the user through an audio channel or directly display the cited document on the users screen.

Grouping in collaborative graphical editors

Often collaborative graphical systems lag behind well accepted single-user applications in terms of features supported. The frequently used operations of group/ungroup offered by almost every single-user graphical editor have not been considered by the collaborative graphical editing systems that try to preserve the intentions of the users involved in the concurrent editing. In this paper we present a novel algorithm based on operation serialisation for consistency maintenance in collaborative graphical editing dealing not only with simple operations such as create, delete, move, change colour or position, but also with group/ungroup operations. Based on the classification of conflicts into real and resolvable, an undo/redo mechanism is used in order to re-execute the operations in an imposed serialisation order.

Digital annotation of printed documents

We present a general model and information server for the digital annotation of printed documents. The resulting annotation framework supports both informal and structured annotations as well as context-dependent services. A demonstrator application for mammography that features both enhanced writing and reading activities is described.