November 2010
The German textbook on human-computer interaction called Interaktive Systeme: Grundlagen, Graphical User Interfaces, Informationsvisualisierung has now been published by Springer and is available to students, researchers and practitioners alike. Based on cognitive foundations, this first volume provides a comprehensive and detailed overview on the design of interactive systems. Starting from input devices up to designing dialogs, all important aspects of traditional graphical user interfaces are discussed. Chapters on interactive Information Visualization are completing this first volume in a series of two. The accompanying book Website provides additional information and material to download.
November 2010
From November 7 to 10 the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2010 took place in Saarbrücken (Germany). The UISE group hired a Van, packed it with lots of technique for the demos and participated with five people. Mathias, Martin, Ricardo, Sebastian and Raimund presented altogether seven contributions at the conference. We received great feedback – and the Best-Poster-Award for our poster A Multi-Touch Alignment Guide for Interactive Displays (Download). Congratulations and also special thanks to all who played a great role in preparing this conference and who sacrified quite some sleep for it. Find impressions of the conference in this picture gallery – from the venue (nice castle), to setting up the demos at the DFKI, the Keynotes by Bradford Paley and Yvonne Rogers, the funny One-Minute-Madness, the exciting demo and poster session to all our presentations and the awards.
With 225 participants, 19 full papers, 13 notes, 28 posters und 22 demos ITS reached record numbers. At the same time, the quality was raised with an acceptance rate of 26%. This also demonstrates the maturity and liveliness of the tabletop community. As one of the demo chairs Raimund Dachselt was also involved in organizing this inspiring conference. Together with Stacey Scott he also conducted the kick-off-workshop for our international exchange program LEIF. Four Canadian and four European universities cooperate in the area of Surface Computing in this program.
October 25th-26th, 2010
In October Salt Lake City hosted the fifth ACM Symposium on Software Visualization as part of the IEEE VisWeek 2010. Mathias presented our full paper Off-Screen Visualization Techniques for Class Diagrams (Download) and received the ACM Distinguished Paper Award for it (see photo). Congratulations on this great success! The paper describes how diagram elements located beyond the current screen view can be displayed as small proxy objects at the border of the screen. At the co-located IEEE InfoVis 2010 we also presented a poster entitled Towards Making InfoVis Views Tangible (Download). This work was done in collaboration with the University of Rostock.
October 2010
Saarbrücken hosts this year’s edition of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2010. We are very proud that seven contributions of the UISE group were accepted for publication and presentation. One paper describes our approach to use multiple tangible magic lenses for information visualization tasks (in collaboration with the Computer Graphics Group at the University of Rostock), another contributes a set of multitouch techniques to explore graphs on tabletops. The latter is a result of a student internship of Sebastian Schmidt at Sheelagh Carpendale’s InnoVis Lab at the University of Calgary. In addition, three poster and two demo contributions showcase our research in the field of gestural interaction with multitouch, pens, and tangible lenses on and above tabletops.
October 15th, 2010
Stacey D. Scott ((University of Waterloo, Systems Design Engineering, Waterloo, Canada) will give a talk in the User Interface Colloquium on October 15th, 2010, about Surface Computing Interfaces to Support Collaborative Decision-Making in Complex Task Environments. Interested listeners are welcome to join us. Stacey is the Canadian lead in the transatlantic exchange project LEIF (see news from August), where Raimund coordinates the European partners.
September 2010
The UISE-group contributed three full papers to the most important HCI conference in German-speaking Europe, i.e. Mensch & Computer. This conference took place from September 12 to 15 in Duisburg, Germany (see photo gallery). The presented papers reported about recent research on digital pen and paper interaction for 3D environments (paper in German), the application of gestures in interactive systems (paper in German) and Gaze-based interaction in Virtual Environments (paper). The last paper was part of the new track “Entertainment Interfaces”.
August 2010
A three year Transatlantic Exchange Partnership project entitled LEIF: A Multicultural Exploration into Research and Education for Surface Computing has been approved by the European Commission (EACEA) for funding (read the full article, German). Four Canadian and four European Universities will work together. 64 students and 16 researchers will be given the opportunity for a multi-month stay at a research institution in the other continent. Jun.-Prof. Raimund Dachselt from the University of Magdeburg is the European coordinator of the project.
Besides supporting students’ mobility and establishing strong research links, a new curriculum in the area of Surface Computing will be established. With it, the exchange programm aims at a novel and very promising way of Human Computer Interaction. Multitouch, digital pen and gestural interaction on interactive surfaces such as smartphones or tabletops will play an ever increasing role in the near future.
June/July 2010
Raimund Dachselt was invited to give two talks at Saxonian universities. On June, 30 he talked about Tangible Magic Lenses, Multitouch and Pens: Natural Interaction with large Displays at the Computer Science Institute of the TU Bergakademie Freiberg. On July, 16 he followed an invitation to give a speech at the ceremony 15 years of the Multimedia Technology Group at the Dresden University of Technology. The topic of this talk was Multimedia Technology Research: Challenges and Vision.
June 5, 2010
Like in last year, we opened our novel User Interface Lab again for a cool night of interactive demos. Hundreds of interested visitors got their hands on research prototypes demonstrating novel ways of natural interaction with future user interfaces. Highlights were combined pen and touch interaction on tabletops, multitouch physics on a SMART educational tabletop, gestural interaction with smartphones and remote displays and again our tangible magic lenses (see photo gallery). Thanks to all group members for sacrificing their sleep!
May/June 2010
Quite a number of visitors listened to two interesting talks in the User Interface Colloquium. On May 21, Eva Hornecker from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow talked about The Chawton House Project: How Co-Designing Novel User Experiences for a Historic Manor House Led to the Idea of In-Situ Authoring Tools. Two weeks later, distinguished VR researcher Bernd Fröhlich from the Bauhaus-University of Weimar gave a talk On 3D User Interfaces. We were happy to welcome both great researchers as our guests and speakers.
May 6, 2010
The UISE-Group allowed interested visitors to get hands on a number of our latest research projects during the open university day last Thursday (Gallery). Visitors, among them many students, came to see applications and demonstrations of Tangible Magic Lenses, Multitouch & Pen Applications and Mobile Device Interaction. It was the first time people could visit the new and extended laboratory with some innovative devices such as the SMART Multitouch Table.
April 2010
As part of our collaboration with the Interactions Lab at Calgary, Canada, the computational visualistics students Sebastian Schmidt and Ricardo Langner did a half-year internship at the iLab. Under the supervision of Sheelagh Carpendale they worked with multitouch tabletops such as the SMART Table and carried out research on physical simulation and graph interaction. In March they returned to Magdeburg with interesting impressions (see picture gallery).
To continue their work and to support our research, the UISE group also acquired a SMART Table. As the fifths tabletop of our group it will be part of the new UI Lab in Room 245. This interactive table does not only allow developing and prototyping multi-touch applications, but also to be used for teaching and students’ projects.
March 22nd – 25th, 2010
The UISE group was represented by a short paper and an associated poster at the sixth ACM Eye Tracking Research & Application Symposium (ETRA 2010) which was held in Austin, Texas, USA from March 22nd until March 25th. This biennial conference brings together eye tracking experts from research and industry (including computer scientists, engineers and behavioral scientists) with the common goal to enhance eye tracking research and applications. Besides 30 talks (ranging from advanced eye tracking hard- and software, specific user studies and adapted gaze-based interaction techniques), very interesting posters and demos were presented.
March 21, 2010
Already for the third time, the leading international conference on Virtual Reality, IEEE VR, was hosting the SEARIS workshop organized by M. Latoschik, R. Blach, D. Reiners, P. Figueroa and R. Dachselt. This workshop on Software Engineering and Architectures for Realtime Interactive Systems addresses the state of the art in the development of interactive realtime graphical systems, mainly in the area of VR, AR, and MR. The full day workshop took place right before the IEEE VR conference 2010 in Waltham (Massachusetts). 35 international participants took part and witnessed not only 14 interesting paper presentations, but also lively and controversal discussions. Like in previous years, the SEARIS proceedings were published with Shaker Verlag. As the picture gallery shows, the IEEE VR conference was a great event, too.
March 1st and 2nd, 2010
Our group was invited to two workshops taking place in Kaiserslautern, Germany. On 1st of March, the HCIV 2010 Workshop on HCI and visualization for software engineering assembled experts such as Nahum Gershon, Jeff Bradshaw, and Gerrit van der Veer. Mathias Frisch was giving a talk on Novel Visualization and Interaction Techniques for Software Modeling with very positive feedback. One day later, Raimund Dachselt talked about Natural Interaction in Complex Information Spaces Using Tangible Magic Lenses during the ViERforES project workshop.
February 11th, 2010
After the visit of Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Heidrun Schumann in December, we welcome her colleague Dr. Christian Tominski from the University of Rostock (Visual Computing and Computer Graphics Group) in our User Interface Colloquium. He will give a talk about Interactive Visualizations of Data and Structures in Time and Space (14:00, G29-Room 301, more information).
Everybody is heartily invited to come to this exciting talk.
February 4th, 2010
An interesting talk about interacting with three-dimensional virtual environments with direct-touch tabletop devices awaits us on Thursday, February 4th, in the User Interface Colloquium. Dr. Rami Ajaj (Computer Sciences Laboratory for Mechanics and Engineering Sciences (LIMSI), UPMC, Orsay, France) will talk about TEAMViz: Tabletop Environment Augmented with Mural Visualization. (14.00, G29-301, more information).
Everybody is cordially invited to attend.
January 13, 2010
During today’s annual faculty meeting Jun.-Prof. Dachselt was awarded a best lecture award for his lecture on Information Visualization in the summer term 2009 (Photo1, Photo2). In every term the farafin (the student representatives of the computer science faculty) awards this prize in the form of a glassy challenge cup to the lecturer, whose lecture was evaluated as the best by the students.
