Scott L. Minneman

Videodraw: a video interface for collaborative drawing

This paper describes VideoDraw, a shared drawing tool, and the process by which it is being designed and developed. VideoDraw is a prototype, videobased, tool that provides a shared “virtual sketchbook” among two or more collaborators. It not only allows the collaborators to see each others’ drawings, but also conveys the accompanying hand gestures and the process of creating and using those drawings. Its design stems from studying how people collaborate using shared drawing spaces. Design implications raised by those studies were embodied in a prototype, which was in turn observed in use situations. Continued research studying the use of VideoDraw (in comparison with other collaborative media) will lead to a better understanding of collaborative drawing activity and inform the continued technical development of VideoDraw.

VideoWhiteboard: video shadows to support remote collaboration

VideoWhiteboard is a prototype tool to support remote shared drawing activity. It provides a whiteboard-sized shared drawing space for collaborators who are located in remote sites. It allows each user to see the drawings and a shadow of the gestures of collaborators at the remote site. The development of VideoWhiteboard is based on empirical studies of collaborative drawing activity, including experiences in using the VideoDraw shared drawing prototype. VideoWhiteboard enables remote collaborators to work together much as if they were sharing a whiteboard, and in some ways allows them to work together even more closely than if they were in the same room.

“I'll get that off the audio”: a case study of salvaging multimedia meeting records

We describe a case study of a complex, ongoing, collaborative work process, where the central activity is a series of meetings reviewing a wide range of subtle technical topics. The problem is the accurate repxting of the results of these meetings, which is the responsibility of a single person, who is not well-versed in all the topics. We provided tools to capture the meeting discussions and tools to “salvage” the cap tured multimedia recordings. Salvaging is a new kind of activity involving replaying, extracting, organizing, and writing. We observed a year of mature salvaging work in the case study. From this we describe the nature of salvage work (the constituent activities, the use of the workspace, the affordances of the audio medium, how practices develop and differentiate, how the content material affects practice). We also demonstrate how this work relates to the larger work processes (the task demands of the setting, the interplay of salvage with capture, the influence on the people being reported on and reported to). Salvaging tools are shown to be valuable for dealing with free-flowing discussions of complex subject matter and for producing high quality documentation.

Listen reader: an electronically augmented paper-based book

While predictions abound that electronic books will supplant traditional paper-based books, many people bemoan the coming loss of the book as cultural artifact. In this project we deliberately keep the affordances of paper books while adding electronic augmentation. The Listen Reader combines the look and feel of a real book - a beautiful binding, paper pages and printed images and text - with the rich, evocative quality of a movie soundtrack. The books multi-layered interactive soundtrack consists of music and sound effects. Electric field sensors located in the book binding sense the proximity of the readers hands and control audio parameters, while RFID tags embedded in each page allow fast, robust page identification. Three different Listen Readers were built as part of a six-month museum exhibit, with more than 350,000 visitors. This paper discusses design, implementation, and lessons learned through the iterative design process, observation, and visitor interviews.

A confederation of tools for capturing and accessing collaborative activity

This paper presents a confederation of tools, called Coral, that combine to support the real-time capture of and subsequent access to informal collaborative activities. The tools provide the means to initiate digital multimedia recordings, a variety of methods to index those recordings, and ways to retrieve the indexed material in other settings. The current system emerged from a convergence of the WhereWereWe multimedia work, the Tivoli LiveBoard application, and the Inter-Language Unification distributed-object programming infrastructure. We are working with a specific user community and application domain, which has helped us shape a particular, demonstrably useful, configuration of tools and to get extensive real-world experience with them. This domain involves frequent discussion and decision-making meetings and later access of the captured records of those meetings to produce accurate documentation. Several aspects of Coral--the application tools, the architecture of the confederation, and the multimedia infrastructure--are described.

Summarization of videotaped presentations: automatic analysis of motion and gesture

This paper presents an automatic system for analyzing and annotating video sequences of technical talks. Our method uses a robust motion estimation technique to detect key frames and segment the video sequence into subsequences containing a single overhead slide. The subsequences are stabilized to remove motion that occurs when the speaker adjusts their slides. Any changes remaining between frames in the stabilized sequences may be due to speaker gestures such as pointing or writing, and we use active contours to automatically track these potential gestures. Given the constrained domain, we define a simple set of actions that can be recognized based on the active contour shape and motion. The recognized actions provide an annotation of the sequence that can be used to access a condensed version of the talk from a Web page.

Evolutionary engagement in an ongoing collaborative work process: a case study

We describe a case study in which experimental collaborationtechnologies were used for over two years in the real, ongoing work process of intellectual property management (IPM) at Xerox PARC. The technologies include LiveBoardbased meeting support tools, laptop notetaking tools, digital audio recording, and workstation tools to later access and replay the meeting activities. In cooperation with the IPM manager, both the work process and the tools were continuously evolved to improve the process. We supported and observed over 60 meetings, leading to a rich set of empirical observations of the meeting activities. We note some practical lessons for this research approach.

Where were we: making and using near-synchronous, pre-narrative video

In order to make higher production speeds possible when making confectionery lollipops a method and a device are presented wherein the separation of the pieces of confectionery takes place by means of a cutting stamp making an up and down movement in the vertical plane and, each time, a piece of confectionery is transferred to a production head in which a partially inserted stick is present already and in which the piece of confectionery is prepressed, whereupon the stick is inserted further into the piece of confectionery during a rotation of the production head to a second position in which, by means of a pressing stamp moving to and fro in radial direction, the subsequent pressing of the lollipops takes place, the production head being rotated thereupon again over a distance to a position in which the lollipop is ejected from the production head.

Design: the what of XFR: eXperiments in the future of reading

Step up to the joystick on the exhibit to the right. A cartoon image of a young boy is projected on the screen. Kids crowd in around you as you read about Henry and his world. (See Figure 1.) There is a world of cartoon images. Lines trail off to small drawings falling away as though seen through a fisheye. As you push the joystick, another image of Henry rolls into view along one of the lines, and a comic-book dialog bubble appears. The story Henry tells is of the things in his imagination and his everyday world. One image leads to the next and then to the next. Over to the left of Henry is a sort of work bench with a touch-screen workstation sitting on it. No pictures on the screen this time, just a title (“Harry the Ape”) and a long paragraph of text. The story is about the creatures that live in Harry’s fur. Sprinkled around A Glimpse of XFR

Artists and technologists working together (panel)

This panel explores the dialog and interplay between artists and technologists. In the process, the panelists aim to bring considerations of art and the artistic process to the attention of the technology-oriented UIST community. We invite readers to think about how your work relates to art. We encourage the research community to look for ways to integrate art and artists within their own programs, for example, by starting artist-in-residence activities, introducing courses on art and design into CS curricula, or inviting artists to participate in projects.