Peter Brandl

Combining and measuring the benefits of bimanual pen and direct-touch interaction on horizontal interfaces

Many research projects have demonstrated the benefits of bimanual interaction for a variety of tasks. When choosing bimanual input, system designers must select the input device that each hand will control. In this paper, we argue for the use of pen and touch two-handed input, and describe an experiment in which users were faster and committed fewer errors using pen and touch input in comparison to using either touch and touch or pen and pen input while performing a representative bimanual task. We present design principles and an application in which we applied our design rationale toward the creation of a learnable set of bimanual, pen and touch input commands.

The NiCE Discussion Room: Integrating Paper and Digital Media to Support Co-Located Group Meetings

Current technological solutions that enable content creation and sharing during group discussion meetings are often cumbersome to use, and are commonly abandoned for traditional paper-based tools, which provide flexibility in supporting a wide range of working styles and task activities that may occur in a given meeting. Paper-based tools, however, have their own drawbacks; paper-based content is difficult to modify or replicate. We introduce a novel digital meeting room design, the NiCE Discussion Room, which integrates digital and paper tools into a cohesive system with an intuitive pen-based interface. The combination of digital and paper media provides groups with a flexible design solution that enables them to create, access, and share information and media from a variety of sources to facilitate group discussions. This paper describes the design solution, along with results from a user study conducted to evaluate the usability and utility of the system.

Occlusion-aware menu design for digital tabletops

In this paper, we describe the design of menus for multi-user digital tabletops. On direct input surfaces, occlusions created by the users hand decrease interaction performance with menus. The key design criteria are to avoid these occlusions and to adapt the menu placement to the users handedness and position on the tabletop. We present an adaptive menu placement method based on direct touch and pen tracking that allows correct menu placement around the table. As an extension, we propose adding a gesture input area for fast interaction which can be partly occluded by the users hand.

Shared design space: sketching ideas using digital pens and a large augmented tabletop setup

Collaborative Augmented Reality (AR) setups are becoming increasingly popular. We have developed a collaborative tabletop environment that is designed for brainstorming and discussion meetings. Using a digital pen, participants can annotate not only virtual paper, but also real printouts. By integrating both forms of physical and digital paper, we combine virtual and real 2d drawings, and digital data which are overlaid into a single information space. In this paper, we describe why we have integrated these devices together in a unique way and how they can be used efficiently during a design process.

An Adaptable Rear-Projection Screen Using Digital Pens And Hand Gestures

INTOI is a rear-projection setup which combines accurate pen tracking with hand gesture recognition. The hardware consists of an Anoto pattern printed on a special rear-projection foil and an infrared tracking system. INTOI is a low-cost system that is scalable and provides highly accurate input (to less than 1mm). Finally, our setup supports a novel multi-user interaction that combines simultaneous interaction of both hand and pen gesture input.

NiCEBook: supporting natural note taking

In this paper, we present NiCEBook, a paper notebook that supports taking, structuring and reusing notes. Through a study of note-taking habits, we observed that different strategies are used to organize and share notes. Based on these observations, we developed a design for a notebook that combines different approaches to better support these activities. The details of our design were informed by an additional online survey. We emphasize the need to examine the characteristics of taking notes with paper notebooks in order to develop a digital system that resembles the quality of traditional writing. With NiCEBook, we present a solution that combines the flexibility and simplicity of taking notes on paper with the benefits of a digital representation. We demonstrate the capabilities of our system through customized views, searching and sharing functionality.

Finding the right way for interrupting people improving their sitting posture

In this paper, 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 workers posture. It is important that users do some training after bad posture and be alerted of this; therefore, we implemented three different alert modalities (Graphical 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. Our user study results show there are different effects on performance and disruptiveness caused by the three interruption techniques. While the vibrotactile feedback might have higher information awareness benefits at the beginning, it causes a huge intrusion side-effect. Thus, the physical feedback was rated less disruptive to the workflow as the other two feedback modalities.

Flux: a tilting multi-touch and pen based surface

FLUX is an interactive touch-sensitive tilting surface that can be used either as a sketching board, as an interactive discussion table, and as a digital presentation whiteboard. The surface, based on a rear-projection screen, supports both multi-touch interaction as well as multiple pen interaction with individual identification of each pen. Our setup combines two tracking technologies. For the hand-tracking, we take advantage of the Frustrated Total Internal Reflection (FTIR) technology. For the pen-tracking, we are using the tracking technology developed by Anoto.

The shared design space

The Shared Design Space is a novel interface for enhancing face-to-face collaboration using multiple displays and input surfaces. The system supports natural gestures and paper-pen input and overcomes the limitations of using traditional technology in co-located meetings and brainstorming activities.

Bridging the gap between real printouts and digital whiteboard

In this paper, we describe a paper-based interface, which combines the physical (real) with the digital world: while interacting with real paper printouts, users can seamlessly work with a digital whiteboard at the same time. Users are able to send data from a real paper to the digital world by picking up the content (e.g. images) from real printouts and drop it on the digital surface. The reverse direction for transferring data from the whiteboard to the real paper is supported through printouts of the whiteboard page that are enhanced with integrated Anoto patterns. We present four different interaction techniques that show the potential of this paper and digital world combination. Moreover, we describe the workflow of our system that bridges the gap between the two worlds in detail.