Pierre Cubaud

Bridging the gap between the digital and the physical: design and evaluation of a mobile augmented reality guide for the museum visit

Can Augmented Reality (AR) techniques inform the design and implementation of a mobile multimedia guide for the museum setting? Drawing from our experience both on previous mobile museum guides projects and in AR technology, we present a fully functional prototype of an AR-enabled mobile multimedia museum guide, designed and implemented for the Museum of Fine Arts in Rennes, France. We report on the life cycle of the prototype and the methodology employed for the AR approach as well as on the selected mixed method evaluation process; finally, the first results emerging from quantitative evaluation are discussed, supported by evidence and findings from the qualitative part of the assessment process. We conclude with lessons learned during the full circle of conception, implementation, testing and assessment of the guide.

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.

Supporting 3D window manipulation with a yawing mouse

We present an interaction technique based on a yawing mouse (a device that senses the yaw orientation), designed for integral manipulation of 3D desktop windows in a three degrees-of-freedom space. We describe the construction of a prototype. A pilot study is conducted in order to investigate the performance gain expected with the yawing mouse. We then discuss some aspects of the form factors of devices intended to this kind of task.

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.

Reading with a digital roll

We introduce the Digital Roll, a cylindrical hand-held device wrapped with a curved display, that can be rotated by hand to provide a continuous scrolling of text. We present design considerations for such a device and report on a preliminary experiment designed to assess its acceptance for casual reading, using a simulator. Encouraging results and their implications on the design of the device are then discussed.

A tangible interface for browsing digital photo collections

We present a design concept of a tangible user interface for browsing image contents. A layer structure for image presentation and three kinematical gestures are proposed to facilitate navigation in the digital photo collections. We describe how gestures support the photo browsing and how the visual display is synchronized with gestures.

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

Interaction design challenges and solutions for ALMA operations monitoring and control

The ALMA radio-telescope, currently under construction in northern Chile, is a very advanced instrument that presents numerous challenges. From a software perspective, one critical issue is the design of graphical user interfaces for operations monitoring and control that scale to the complexity of the system and to the massive amounts of data users are faced with. Early experience operating the telescope with only a few antennas has shown that conventional user interface technologies are not adequate in this context. They consume too much screen real-estate, require many unnecessary interactions to access relevant information, and fail to provide operators and astronomers with a clear mental map of the instrument. They increase extraneous cognitive load, impeding tasks that call for quick diagnosis and action. To address this challenge, the ALMA software division adopted a user-centered design approach. For the last two years, astronomers, operators, software engineers and human-computer interaction researchers have been involved in participatory design workshops, with the aim of designing better user interfaces based on state-of-the-art visualization techniques. This paper describes the process that led to the development of those interface components and to a proposal for the science and operations console setup: brainstorming sessions, rapid prototyping, joint implementation work involving software engineers and human-computer interaction researchers, feedback collection from a broader range of users, further iterations and testing.