Seth E. Hunter

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.

Examining values: an analysis of nine years of IDC research

Explicitly examining the values held by a research community provides a tool in which participants can define its culture, conduct informed research, and reflect on their design process. We conducted a content analysis of the values expressed in the full text of IDC papers between 2002 and 2010, as well as a survey of the first authors of these papers. We discuss the types of contributions IDC papers make, the behaviors and qualities they seek to support in children, the audience for which IDC designs, the role of the child in creating these designs, the theories and models that inform this research, and the criteria that inform IDCs technical design choices. Based on our findings, we discuss trends, core values, and implications for the community and highlight opportunities for future IDC contributions.

Make a Riddle and TeleStory: designing children's applications for the siftables platform

We present the design of Make a Riddle and TeleStory, educational applications developed on the Siftables platform for children aged 4-7 years. Siftables are hybrid tangible-graphical user interface devices with motion and neighbor sensing, graphical display, and wireless communication. Siftables provide a unique opportunity to give children responsive feedback about the movement and arrangement of a distributed set of objects. We contrast the use case that includes an external display to their use as a standalone application platform. We outline design strategies for communicating information about the affordances of the Siftables and methods of providing dynamic feedback to encourage manipulation and to increase engagement during application use for hybrid tangible-graphical user interfaces.

MemTable: an integrated system for capture and recall of shared histories in group workspaces

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of an interactive tabletop system that supports co-located meeting capture and asynchronous search and review of past meetings. The goal of the project is to evaluate the design of a conference table that augments the everyday work patterns of small collaborative groups by incorporating an integrated annotation system. We present a holistic design that values hardware ergonomics, supports heterogeneous input modalities, generates a memory of all user interactions, and provides access to historical data on and off the table. We present a user evaluation that assesses the usefulness of the input modalities and software features, and validates the effectiveness of the MemTable system as a tool for assisting memory recall.

PoCoMo: projected collaboration using mobile devices

As personal projection devices become more common they will be able to support a range of exciting and unexplored social applications. We present a novel system and method that enables playful social interactions between multiple projected characters. The prototype consists of two mobile projector-camera systems, with lightly modified existing hardware, and computer vision algorithms to support a selection of applications and example scenarios. Our system allows participants to discover the characteristics and behaviors of other characters projected in the environment. The characters are guided by hand movements, and can respond to objects and other characters, to simulate a mixed reality of life-like entities.

OneSpace: shared visual scenes for active freeplay

Children engage in free play for emotional, physical and social development; researchers have explored supporting free play between physically remote playmates using videoconferencing tools. We show that the configuration of the video conferencing setup affects play. Specifically, we show that a shared visual scene configuration promotes fundamentally active forms of engaged, co-operative play.

Designing digital puppetry systems: guidelines and best practices

This instructive video presents guidelines and best practices for designers of digital puppetry systems by demonstrating four common setups and illustrating the benefits and limitations of each approach. Practical suggestions and humorous examples of green-screening techniques, digital composition, using rod puppets and using a Kinect camera are included to illustrate the possibilities and pitfalls of real-time animation for HCI designers interested in using computer vision to support creative expression with physical objects.

Development strategies for tangible interaction on horizontal surfaces

Tangible interactions on horizontal surfaces are increasingly relevant for collaborative applications, embodied interaction, musical performance, and interaction with 3D information. This unique studio opportunity introduces approaches to developing applications on four related platforms: the Reactable: a musical tabletop, and its companion fiducial tracking system reacTIVision, Microsoft Surface: a commercial multi-touch table, MemTable: a large interactive tabletop, and Relief: a responsive 3D surface. It will focus on the unique affordances of multi-input and multi-user event handling shared and afforded by each of the four platforms. Participants will work in small groups within some simplified code templates to develop a small applications focused on co-located input by multiple people, combining the use of tangible objects and touch input.