Johannes Schoening & Friends Research: Videos of Multi-User Interaction on Multi-touch Walls and Tables

In this post, I'm featuring videos of the interactive work of Johannes Schoening, a member of the NUI-Group, and his collaborators. Johhannes works at the Innovative Retail Laboratory of the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence ( DFKI ) in Saarbrücken. Prof. Dr. Antonio Krüger is director of this lab.   He also works with Michael Rohs at the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin. 

Johannes received a Diploma in Geoinformatik at the University of Münster at the Institute for Geoinformatics in 2007.  His research interests are new methods and interfaces to intuitive navigate through spatial information or in general new intelligent interfaces that help people to solve daily tasks more effectively.  His interests include mobile augmented reality applications, the use of Wikipedia as a knowledge database, and home grown multi-touch surfaces . (More information can be found on Johannes' website.)

Note:  The 2010 Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces conference will be held in Germany, and Johannes and others will be involved with running it. You can follow the news on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/its_Germany2010.  The link to the conference website will be up soon, at http://www.its2010.org/ .

The descriptions below each video are from Johannes' YouTube Research Channel.

Multi-touch Risk

"A multi-touch and multi-user version of the classical Risk game. As a platform Nasa World Wind (WWJ) and the Java implementation of Risk "Domination" by yura.net were used. A authentication method (that was also integrated in the game) can be found in the last (next)  video. Thanks to Klaus Drerup & Wadim Hamm."  TEAM:  Klaus Drerup, Wadim Hamm, Florian Daiber, & Johannes Schoening.  Music by cycom: mathematics.

User Authentication on Large Multi-touch Wall with Mobile Device

"The exploitation of finger and hand tracking technology based on infrared light, such as FTIR, Diffused Illumina- tion (DI) or Diffused Surface Illumination (DSI) has enabled the construction of large-scale, low-cost, interactive multi-touch surfaces. In this context, access and security problems arise if larger teams operate these surfaces with different access rights. The team members might have several levels of authority or specific roles, which determine what functions and objects they are allowed to access via the multi-touch surface. In this video we present first concepts and strategies to authenticate with a large-scale multi-touch wall using a mobile device."

GeoLens: Allowing Multi-User Interaction with Geographic Information Systems on Interactive Surfaces

"This video shows the GlobalData application in use on an Archimedes SessionDesk http://www.archimedes-products.com/se The application was used to illustrate our GeoLens concept. GeoLenses are GUI widgets that can be used like scalable as well as zoomable magnifying lenses to allow synchronous multi-user interaction in GIS systems."

Google Is My Friend: The Google Chrome OS video, if you haven't yet seen it...

I've been meaning to watch the Google Chrome OS video. I'm the 609,825th viewer of the YouTube version below:



The Chromium Projects

Varied Collection of Interface Interactions: Art and Sculpture Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure

Cross posted on The World Is My Interface

I've been exploring the contributions of artists to the world of interactive digital media. Here are videos of some of the interesting works I've come across recently.  Some of the videos are of older works, but were new to me.


INTERACTIVE KINETIC SCULPTURE
Kinetic Pond

(I'm still searching for more information regarding the Kinetic Pond.)

Rose Finn-Kelcey:  It Pays to Pray.  Interactive Sculpture at the Cass Sculpture Foundation.  Filmed by Robin Fitton.

"Insert 20p and select one of a range of prayers. An interactive sculpture which gives you back the money after providing an interesting message. Warning not to be used by the holy or holey. The prayers were about relationships with various chocolate bar brands."    It Pays to Pray Description


Fiber Cloud, MIT Mobile Experience Lab

The Cloud - from MIT Mobile Experience Lab on Vimeo.
For more information, see the Fiber Cloud web page.


Marque Cornblatt: Interactive Kinetic Steampunk Sculptures (1993-1996)

Marque Cornblatt blogs at The MediaSapien:  The Art and Culture of Hypermediated Identity
Marque Cornblatt's MFA Thesis:  The Emergence of the MediaSapien

Daniel Rozin's Wooden Mirrors (Uses video system)

More Information: Daniel Rozin Interactive Art


GIANT- Interactive Sculpture at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh (2008) David Butts
Imagine what this could do if it was controlled by gestures and a system of sensors!


Nothing (without you)(Adam Chapman)Warning: What is inside the box is sort of yucky!


Hall of Faces that Follow
(Installation at Puzzling World in New Zealand-I don't think this installation is computerized.)




Interactive Sculpture:  MirrorMap, by Ryan Schenk


Self Organizing Still Life- David Fried's Kinetic Sculpture at the Atlanta Botanical Garden (responds to sounds)


Another video of Self Organizing Still Life

Act/React: Interactive Art Installation Video Milwaulkee Art Museum
Brian Knep discusses computer technology and his art:


Scott Snibbe's Deep Walls   Milwaukee Art Museum

Scott Snibbe's Artist's Statement (Focuses on interaction)

Cultural Analytics of Mark Rothko Paintings on the 287-Megapixel HIPerSpace Wall at Calit2

This is what I'd might like to use for my multi-dimensional interactive timeline project!

The interactive Cultural Analytics software system was developed by UC San Diego's Software Studies Initiative (featured in a previous post), and the Graphics, Visualization and Virtual Reality Laboratory.

Jeremy Douglass Presents Cultural Analytics on the Interactive HIperSpace Wall at Calit2


Description of Cultural Analytics, from the Software Studies Initiative Website


"The explosive growth of cultural content on the web including social media since 2004 and the digitization efforts by museums, libraries, and companies since the 1990s make possible fundamentally new paradigm for the study of both contemporary and historical cultures. We can use computer-based techniques for quantitative analysis and interactive visualization already commonly employed in sciences to begin analyzing patterns in massive cultural data sets. To make an analogy with "visual analytics," "business analytics," and "web analytics," we call this new paradigm cultural analytics."

"We believe that a systematic use of large-scale computational analysis and interactive visualization of cultural data sets and data streams will become a major trend in cultural criticism and culture industries in the coming decades. What will happen when humanists start using interactive visualizations as a standard tool in their work, the way many scientists do already? If slides made possible art history, and if a movie projector and video recorder enabled film studies, what new cultural disciplines may emerge out of the use of interactive visualization and data analysis of large cultural data sets?"

"The idea of Cultural Analytics was first presented by Lev Manovich in 2005. Software Studies Initiative founded at Calit2 in 2007 made possible to turn this vision into a research program. By drawing on the cutting-edge cyberinfrastructure and visualization research at Calit2 as well as world reputation of UCSD in digital arts and theory, we are able to develop a unique research agenda which complements other projects in digital humanities and "cyberscholarship":

• while most projects in digital humanities deal with text, we focus on automatic analysis of visual and media cultures and artifacts: video games, visual art, media design, cinema, animation, AMV, machinema, photography, etc.;
• in developing techniques particularly suited for cultural visualization, we draw both from visualization fields (information visualization, scientific visualization, visual analytics) and from media and digital art;
• we are also developing techniques for analysis and visualization of born digital content such as video games, web sites and social media."

Links to white papers, scholarly papers, presentations, and photos related to this cultural visualization and related techniques/projects can be found on the UCSD Cultural Analytics web page.

The Emerging Field of Software Studies: Anne Helmond's Presentation: "Blogging and the blogosphere through the eyes of software and search engines"; UCSD's Software Studies Initiative

The slideshare presentation is by Anne Helmond, a New Media PhD candidate with the Digital Methods Initiative at the Mediastudies department at the University of Amsterdam where she studied New Media from 2004-2008. She is focusing her work "on the emerging field of Software Studies, which addresses the role that software plays in our society."

The presentation caught my eye because I've been using my blogs as on-line file cabinets, and discovered that my my careful tagging, designed to help me search my own posts, has been something highly favored by search engines. Anne has given this topic some deep thoughts, as you can see from the presentation.
Blogging and the blogosphere through the eyes of software and search engines

The Software Studies Initiative at UCSD  The description below was taken from the UCSD Software Studies Initiative website:

"Google searches and Amazon recommendations, airline flight paths and traffic lights, email and your phone: our culture runs on software. How does software shape the world?



"Software Studies is a new research field for intellectual inquiry that is now just beginning to emerge. The very first book that has this term in its title was published by The MIT Press in June 2008 (Matthew Fuller, ed., Software Studies: A Lexicon). In August 2008 The MIT Press approved Software Studies book series, with Matthew Fuller, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Lev Manovich as editors."

"The Software Studies Initiative intends to play the key role in establishing this new field. The competed projects will become the models of how to effectively study “software society.” Through workshops, publications, and lectures conducted at UCSD and disseminated via the web and in hard copy publications, we will disseminate the broad vision of software studies. That is, we think of software as a layer that permeates all areas of contemporary societies. Therefore, if we want to understand contemporary techniques of control, communication, representation, simulation, analysis, decision-making, memory, vision, writing, and interaction, our analysis can't be complete until we consider this software layer. By being the very first center of its kind, The UCSD Software Studies Initiative has the unique opportunity to shape how this software layer will be understood and studied by other universities, programs, and centers in years to come."

"Social scientists, philosophers, cultural critics, and media and new media theorists now seem to cover all aspects of the IT revolution, creating a number of new disciplines such as cyber culture, Internet studies, new media theory, and digital culture. Yet the underlying engine that drives most of these subjects – software – has received little or no direct attention. Software is still invisible to most academics, artists, and cultural professionals interested in IT and its cultural and social effects. But if we continue to limit critical discussions to the notions of “cyber,” “digital,” “new media,” or “Internet,” we are in danger of always dealing only with effects rather than causes; the output that appears on a computer screen rather than the programs and social cultures that produce these outputs. This is why we are convinced that “software studies” is necessary and we welcome you to join us in our projects and activities....“software studies” translates into two complementary research paradigms. On the one hand, we want to study software and cyberinfrastructure using approaches from humanities, cultural criticism, and social sciences. On the other hand, we want to bring software-based research methods and cutting-edge cyberinfrastructrure tools and resources or the study of the new domain where they have not being applied so far – large sets of cultural data."

Pictures from the Software Studies Initiative website & culturevis' Flickr photostream:


Cultural Analytics Research Environment + HiPerWall



Interactive exploration of an image collection on a HIPerSpace tiled display



Legend of Zelda Map Visualization



Data Exploration on the HiPerWall

Anne Helmond's Presentation

This post was updated and moved:


http://interactivemultimediatechnology.blogspot.com/2009/11/emerging-field-of-software-studies-anne.html