HCI – vialab | Dr. Christopher Collins

Tilt-Responsive Techniques for Digital Drawing Boards

Contributors:

Hugo Romat, Christopher Collins, Nathalie Riche, Michel Pahud, Christian Holz, Adam Riddle, Bill Buxton, and Ken Hinckley

Drawing boards offer a self-stable work surface that is continuously adjustable. On digital displays, such as the Microsoft Surface Studio, these properties open up a class of techniques that sense and respond to tilt adjustments. Each display posture—whether angled high, low, or somewhere in-between—affords some activities, but not others. Because what is appropriate also depends on the application and task, we explore a range of app-specific transitions between reading vs. writing (annotation), public vs. personal, shared person-space vs. task-space, and other nuances of input and feedback, contingent on display angle. Continuous responses provide interactive transitions tailored to each use-case. We show how a variety of knowledge work scenarios can use sensed display adjustments to drive context-appropriate transitions, as well as technical software details of how to best realize these concepts. A preliminary remote user study suggests that techniques must balance the effort required to adjust the tilt, versus the potential benefits of a sensed transition.

Publications

Textension: Digitally Augmenting Document Spaces in Analog Texts

Contributors:

Adam James Bradley, Christopher Collins, Victor Sawal, and Sheelagh Carpendale

In this paper, we present a framework that allows people who work with analog texts to leverage the affordances of digital technology, such as data visualization, computational linguistics, and search, using any web-based mobile device with a camera. After taking a picture of a particular page or set of pages from a text or uploading an existing image, our prototype system builds an interactive digital object that automatically inserts visualizations and interactive elements into the document. Leveraging the findings of previous studies, our framework augments the reading of analog texts with digital tools, making it possible to work with texts in both a digital and analog environment.

Check out our online demo.

Publications

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by NSERC Canada Research Chairs, The Canada Foundation for Innovation – Cyberinfrastructure Fund, and the Province of Ontario – Ontario Research Fund.

Eye Tracking for Target Acquisition in Sparse Visualizations

Contributors:

Feiyang Wang, Adam James Bradley, and Christopher Collins

In this paper, we present a novel marker-free method for identifying screens of interest when using head-mounted eye-tracking for visualization in cluttered and multi-screen environments. We offer a solution to discerning visualization entities from sparse backgrounds by incorporating edge-detection into the existing pipeline. Our system allows for both more efficient screen identification and improved accuracy over the state-of-the-art ORB algorithm.

The source code for this project is available on our Github.

Publications

Acknowledgements

ActiveInk: (Th)Inking with Data

Contributors:

Hugo Romat, Nathalie Henry Riche, Ken Hinckley, Bongshin Lee, Caroline Appert, Emmanuel Pietriga, and Christopher Collins

During sensemaking, people annotate insights: underlining sentences in a document or circling regions on a map. They jot down their hypotheses: drawing correlation lines on scatterplots or creating personal legends to track patterns. We present ActiveInk, a system enabling people to seamlessly transition between exploring data and externalizing their thoughts using pen and touch. ActiveInk enables the natural use of a pen for active reading behaviours while supporting analytic actions by activating any of these ink strokes. Through a qualitative study with eight participants, we contribute observations of active reading behaviours during data exploration and design principles to support sensemaking.

This research was given an honourable mention at CHI 2019.

Learn more about ActiveInk by visiting the project’s website and be sure to check out Microsoft’s blog post on ActiveInk.

Publications

Acknowledgements

Detecting Negative Emotion for Mixed Initiative Visual Analytics

Contributors:

Prateek Panwar and Christopher Collins

The work describes an efficient model to detect negative mind states caused by visual analytics tasks. We have developed a method for collecting data from multiple sensors, including GSR and eye-tracking, and quickly generating labelled training data for the machine learning model. Using this method we have created a dataset from 28 participants carrying out intentionally difficult visualization tasks. We have concluded the paper by discussing the best performing model, Random Forest, and its future applications for providing just-in-time assistance for visual analytics.

Publications

Metatation: Annotation for Interaction to Bridge Close and Distant Reading

Contributors:

Hrim Mehta, Adam Bradley, Mark Hancock, and Christopher Collins

In the domain of literary criticism, many critics practice close reading, annotating by hand while performing a detailed analysis of a single text. Often this process employs the use of external resources to aid analysis. In this article, we present a study and subsequent tool design focused on leveraging a critic’s annotations as implicit interactions for initiating context-specific computational support that automatically searches external resources. We observed 14 poetry critics performing a close reading, revealing a set of cognitive practices supported through free-form annotation that have not previously been discussed in this context. We used guidelines derived from our study to design a tool, Metatation, which uses a pen-and-paper system with a peripheral display to utilize reader annotations as underspecified interactions to augment close reading. By turning paper-based annotations into implicit queries, Metatation provides relevant supplemental information in a just-in-time manner and acts as a bridge between close and distant reading.

Publications

Off-Screen Desktop

Contributors:

Erik Paluka and Christopher Collins

We present Off-Screen Desktop, spatial navigation techniques that make use of the space around the display to extend direct manipulation beyond the desktop screen. To enable off-screen direct manipulation, these techniques visually transform the information space without affecting its interaction space. This allows a person to interact with the information space as if it physically extended beyond the boundaries of the display. Off-Screen Desktop is characterized by its implicit transience where the applied visual transformations are automatically reverted when the hand leaves the associated spatial interaction space. We illustrate Off-Screen Desktop with the design of three different techniques, which include Dynamic Distortion, Spatial Panning, and Dynamic Peephole Inset, as well as their evaluation in a comparative study with standard mouse panning. We also demonstrate their applicability with a number of use cases. Study results show that Spatial Panning was overall significantly faster than the other Off-Screen Desktop techniques when employed in two different navigation tasks.

Check out our GitHub Repository for source code related to this project.

Publications

Acknowledgements

Simple Multi-Touch Toolkit

Contributors:

Erik Paluka, Zachary Cook, Mark Hancock, and Christopher Collins

While multi-touch computing becomes more common, there comes a requirement for students to learn how to create software for multi-touch environments. Although there are many powerful toolkits that exist already, they require a strong programming background and thus become difficult to integrate into fast-paced human-computer interaction (HCI) courses or for non-CS students to use. Researchers at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) and the University of Waterloo (UW) have developed a toolkit with a simplified API called the Simple Multi-Touch Toolkit (SMT).

Based around the concept of touch-enabled zones, SMT is built as a library for the popular processing platform or as a standalone Java library. By integrating with Processing’s simplified syntax, SMT makes prototyping multi-touch applications fast and easy. SMT natively supports TUIO and works on Windows Touch but also provides a multi-touch simulator to support non-touch enabled environments. While SMT was designed to support students and used in undergraduate HCI courses at both UOIT and UW in experimenting with multi-touch input, SurfNet researchers have also used SMT to develop several applications.

The project’s main website is located here at http://vialab.science.uoit.ca/smt/

Check out our GitHub Repository for source code related to this project.

Publications

Acknowledgements

Tabletop Text Entry Techniques

Contributors:

Uta Hinrichs, Mark Hancock, Christopher Collins, and Sheelagh Carpendale

We explored the space of possible text entry techniques for tabletop displays and suggested important considerations for deciding upon a text-entry technique for a given situation.