Toshifumi Arai

PaperLink: a technique for hyperlinking from real paper to electronic content

Paper is a very convenient medium for presenting information. It is familiar, flexible, portable, inexpensive, user modifiable, and offers better readability properties than existing electronic displays. However, paper displays are static and do not offer capabilities such as dynamic content, and hyperlinking that can be provided with electronic media. PaperLink is a system which augments paper documents with electronic features. PaperLink uses a highlighter pen augmented with a camera, along with simple computer vision and pattern recognition techniques, to allow a user to make marks on paper which can have associations and meaning in an electronic world, and to “pick up” printed material for use as electronic input. This paper will consider the prototype PaperLink hardware and software system, and its application to hyperlinking from paper to electronic content.

Retrieving electronic documents with real-world objects on InteractiveDESK

We are developing a computerized desk which we have named InteractiveDESK [1]. One of the major features of the InteractiveDESK is reality awareness; that is, the ability to respond to situational changes in the real world in order to reduce users’ workloads. In this paper, we present a new method, as an example of the reality awareness, to retrieve electronic documents with real objects such as paper documents or folders. Users of the InteractiveDESK can retrieve electronic documents by just showing real objects which have links to the electronic documents. The links are made by the users through interactions with the InteractiveDESK. The advantage of this method is that the user can unify the arrangement of electronic documents into the arrangement of real objects.

InteractiveDESK: a computer-augmented desk which responds to operations on real objects

Office and engineering workers’ workloads are reduced with a computer-augmented desk named InteractiveDESK. The desk has a large desktop display with a pen-input facility and an ordinary upright display with a keyboard, thus integrating features of conventional systems and pen-based systems. The desk detects the operations on real objects on its real desk top, and responds to the operations to reduce users’ workloads. The prototype of the desk assists users in switching input methods and retrieving electronic files.

Adding another communication channel to reality: an experience with a chat-augmented conference

This paper reports our recent experience with a 3-day technical conference, which was fully augmented by a chat system and a telepresence camera. In this trial, the chat acted as a sub-channel to reality; participants both in local and remote conference rooms can freely interchange their thoughts or opinions inspired by presentations through the chat. We observed several interactions between virtual (chat) and real discussions during the conference namely, (1) Chat discussions often activated discussions in the real world, while treating tiny questions, (2) Co-authors could provide supplemental information through the chat while the first author was presenting, and (3) Participants who were not familiar with the research topic could get more understanding from the chat. We also observed the effect of anthropomorphic representation by switching the chat system between textand comic-based.

Design concept of a system for developing application-dependent user interface

The authors describe a novel approach to a user interface management system (UIMS), which does not need much programming effort constructing graphical user interfaces. Using a conventional UIMS, designers can develop a graphical user interface by combination of user-interface parts such as menus or meters. But in this approach, a variety of user-interface parts are needed to build a graphical user interface customized for a particular application, and it is also difficult to prepare all parts types beforehand. The authors extend the UIMS concept by which a designer can build a graphical user interface for a particular application without any programming. Its main points are: (1) not only using the parts, but drawing a picture for display design by a graphical editor, (2) then relating the picture to an application program, and (3) adding echoing functions to the picture by deciding how to manipulate figures using interactive methods.<<ETX>>