Dan Saffer's Book: Designing Gestural Interfaces; Gregory Siegal's LifeMap Photo App

Dan Saffer's new book, Designing Gestural Interfaces, is out!




Dan Saffer's company, Kicker Studio, specializes in touch screens and gestural interfaces. Chan Wook sent me a link to Dan's recent blog post, Concept: Desktop Touchscreen System. The post includes a variety of illustrations of various touch-screen interactions and features, including a "haptics keyboard when you need it". (Thanks, Chan Wook!)

If you are interested in multi-touch and gesture interfaces and interaction, join the Multi-touch Book Club at Jonathan Brill's site, Point & Do, for more information. The discussion will center around Dan Saffer's new book.

Dan Saffer is the author of Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices, one of my favorite books in the field of interaction:

Chan Wook also recommended a look at Gregory Siegal's LifeMap concept:


According to Siegal's website, "The LifeMap is a touch -screen digital photo storing and organization product. After tagging photos with people, places, and keywords, the LifeMap organizes the images in a way that users can document their lives over time..."My inspiration for the LifeMap came from noticing the lack of intimacy in the interaction with most everyday products. Family photographs are very important and currently the process of storing and organizing them is tedious and boring. I wanted to create a product for families that would promote a meaningful interaction and attach more intimacy to digital family photos."

(Gregory Siegal is working on a BFA in Industrial Design from Carnegie Mellon, with an expected graduation in May of 2009.)

Quick Post: Video clip of RENCI's exhibit at SC'08. Includes a view of a multi-touch table.

This is a videoclip of RENCI's exhibit at SC'08 (Supercomputing 08, Austin, TX). Quite a nice set-up!



-RENCI Vis Group Multi-touch Blog

An Example of Convergence: Interactive TV : uxTV 2008

I missed this one!



Jeremy Vaught, the administrator of the New Media Facebook group, posted about the the First International Conference on Designing Interactive User Experiences for TV and Video, held October 22-24, 2008 in Silicon Valley, California. The conference was sponsored by Microsoft Mediaroom, and ifip (International Federation for Information Processing).

According to the conference website, the papers from the conference can be found in the ACM digital library, AICPS: UZTV'08.

Featured speakers included Jakob Nielson (usability guru), Elissa Lee (Sr. Director of Research, TiVo), Gunthar Hartwig (User Experience, YouTube), and Dale Herigstad (Chief Creative Officer, Schematic).

Here is a sample of the topics covered during the conference:

Designing for User Experience: What to Expect from Mobile 3D TV and Video?
(Satu Jumisko-Pyykko, Mandy Weitzel, & Dominik Strohmeier)

The Concept of Interactivity - revisited: Four new typologies for a new media landscape
(Jens F. Jensen)

The Interactive Television User Experience So Far
(William Cooper)

Absolute Pointing and Tracking based Remote Control for Interactive User Experience
(John Sweetser, Anders Grunnet-Jepsen, and Gopal Panchanathan, ThinkOptics Inc.)

Network Analysis of Massively Collaborative Creation of Multimedia Contents: Case Study of Hatsune Miku videos on Nico Nico Duoga (Masahiro Hamasaki, Hideaki Takeda, Takuichi Nishimura)

The uxtv08 website has links to information about the various demos that were presented at the conference. To save you time, I've linked them below:

Demos

Data Driven Interactive 'Lower Third' - Vikram Singh

Dynamic TV: a New Inter-tainment Paradigm for Television - Marina Geymonat, Rossana Simeoni, Monica Perrero, Elena Guercio, Maurizio Belluati, Agnese Vellar and Roberto Montanari

Interactive advertising on n-tv plus - Kathrin Damian, Christian Bopp, Lars-Eric Mann

Interactive Live Demo of Fraunhofer FOKUS Media Interoperability Lab - Oliver Friedrich, Robert Seeliger, Benjamin Zachey, Christian Riede and Stefan Arbanowski

Microsoft Windows Media Center - Linda Chan

Microsoft Mediaroom - Linda Chan and David Giusti

Multi-dimensional Direct Pointing Remote Control for Interactive User Experience - John Sweetser, Anders Grunnet-Jepsen and Gopal Panchanathan

Tarae: Prototype of new interface design for digital TV browsing and navigation system - Hyun Suk Kim, Joung Young Lee and Sang Pil Hwang

Streaming Museum in Cyberspace and Public Space on 7 Continents

For more information, see my recent post on the Technology Supported Human-World Interaction blog.

Demo of Duke University's multi-touch wall at RENCI, running the Cobalt Metaverse Browser

The video below shows the "pre-alpha" version of the Cobalt Metaverse Browser:



"This video shows the Cobalt metaverse browser being tested on a 13-foot by 5-foot multi-touch visualization wall equipped with six high-definition projectors located at the Renaissance Computing Institute engagement center at Duke University. The input drivers are being developed by Dr. Xunlei Wu so that users can directly manipulate high-resolution data using both hands and multiple fingers for a more natural and intuitive data exploration experience. In the video, Dr. Wu is using both gesture and touch to navigate through, and rearrange content between, two Cobalt virtual worlds."

Related:
The Open Cobalt Project (on ning)
Cobalt Website & link to download to the latest pre-alpha build
Cobalt Community,
Cobalt Google Group
EduSim (A 3D multi-user virtual world platform and authoring toolkit for K-12 interactive whiteboards. The latest version is powered by Cobalt)

Cobalt can import objects from the Google 3D warehouse as well as Google Sketch-up:
Video Tutorial: Using Google 3D Warehouse to build Cobalt & Edusim Virtual Worlds

People:
Julian Lombardi, Duke University
Xunlei Wu, Senior Visualization Researcher, RENCI, Duke University
Rich White, EduSim; Greenbush Education Service Center, Girard, KS

Kids using Cobalt-based EduSim on desktop computers, via Rich White:

Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines: All Windows programs should be touchable!

If you are a designer/developer who would like to develop applications that can support touch interaction, it will save you some time to study the Windows Vista User Experience "Touch" guidelines. You'll find information about the eight flick events, (gestures that correspond to keyboard shortcuts for navigation and editing), the 40 or so gestures recognized by Vista, tips for creating controls, GetMessageExtraInfo function, and more.


"As touch spreads from Tablet PCs to other types of computers, software program developers and designers will find it increasingly important to support touch as well. All Windows programs should have a great touch experience. Users should be able to perform your program's most important tasks efficiently using a finger."