Designing to Support Workspace Awareness in Remote Collaboration using 2D Interactive Surfaces

Increasing distributions of the global workforce are leading to collaborative workamong remote coworkers. The emergence of such remote collaborations is essentiallysupported by technology advancements of screen-based devices ranging from tabletor laptop to large displays. However, these devices, especially personal and mobilecomputers, still suffer from certain limitations caused by their form factors, that hinder supporting workspace awareness through non-verbal communication suchas bodily gestures or gaze. This thesis thus aims to design novel interfaces andinteraction techniques to improve remote coworkers’ workspace awareness throughsuch non-verbal cues using 2D interactive surfaces.The thesis starts off by exploring how visual cues support workspace awareness infacilitated brainstorming of hybrid teams of co-located and remote coworkers. Basedon insights from this exploration, the thesis introduces three interfaces for mobiledevices that help users maintain and convey their workspace awareness with their coworkers. The first interface is a virtual environment that allows a remote person to effectively maintain his/her awareness of his/her co-located collaborators’ activities while interacting with the shared workspace. To help a person better express his/her hand gestures in remote collaboration using a mobile device, the second interfacepresents a lightweight add-on for capturing hand images on and above the device’sscreen; and overlaying them on collaborators’ device to improve their workspace awareness. The third interface strategically leverages the entire screen space of aconventional laptop to better convey a remote person’s gaze to his/her co-locatedcollaborators. Building on the top of these three interfaces, the thesis envisions an interface that supports a person using a mobile device to effectively collaborate with remote coworkers working with a large display.Together, these interfaces demonstrate the possibilities to innovate on commodity devices to offer richer non-verbal communication and better support workspace awareness in remote collaboration

Contributions to the cornerstones of interaction in visualization: strengthening the interaction of visualization

Visualization has become an accepted means for data exploration and analysis. Although interaction is an important component of visualization approaches, current visualization research pays less attention to interaction than to aspects of the graphical representation. Therefore, the goal of this work is to strengthen the interaction side of visualization. To this end, we establish a unified view on interaction in visualization. This unified view covers four cornerstones: the data, the tasks, the technology, and the human.Visualisierung hat sich zu einem unverzichtbaren Werkzeug für die Exploration und Analyse von Daten entwickelt. Obwohl Interaktion ein wichtiger Bestandteil solcher Werkzeuge ist, wird der Interaktion in der aktuellen Visualisierungsforschung weniger Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet als Aspekten der graphischen Repräsentation. Daher ist es das Ziel dieser Arbeit, die Interaktion im Bereich der Visualisierung zu stärken. Hierzu wird eine einheitliche Sicht auf Interaktion in der Visualisierung entwickelt

Opportunities and challenges for cross-device interactions in the wild

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Mobile Pen and Paper Interaction

Although smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices become increasingly popular, pen and paper continue to play an important role in mobile settings, such as note taking or creative discussions. However, information on paper documents remains static and usage practices involving sharing, researching, linking or in any other way digitally processing information on paper are hindered by the gap between the digital and physical worlds. A considerable body of research has leveraged digital pen technology in order to overcome this problem with respect to static settings, however, systematically neglecting the mobile domain. Only recently, several approaches began exploring the mobile domain and developing initial insights into mobile pen-and-paper interaction (mPPI), e.g., to publish digital sketches, [Cowan et al., 2011], link paper and digital artifacts, [Pietrzak et al., 2012] or compose music, [Tsandilas, 2012]. However, applications designed to integrate the most common mobile tools pen, paper and mobile devices, thereby combining the benefits of both worlds in a hybrid mPPI ensemble, are hindered by the lack of supporting infrastructures and limited theoretical understanding of interaction design in the domain. This thesis advances the field by contributing a novel infrastructural approach toward supporting mPPI. It allows applications employing digital pen technology in controlling interactive functionality while preserving mobile characteristics of pen and paper. In addition, it contributes a conceptual framework of user interaction in the domain suiting to serve as basis for novel mPPI toolkits. Such toolkits ease development of mPPI solutions by focusing on expressing interaction rather than designing user interfaces by means of rigid widget sets. As such, they provide the link between infrastructure and interaction in the domain. Lastly, this thesis presents a novel, empirically substantiated theory of interaction in hybrid mPPI ensembles. This theory informs interaction design of mPPI, ultimately allowing to develop compelling and engaging interactive systems employing this modality

Playful Materialities

Game culture and material culture have always been closely linked. Analog forms of rule-based play (ludus) would hardly be conceivable without dice, cards, and game boards. In the act of free play (paidia), children as well as adults transform simple objects into multifaceted toys in an almost magical way. Even digital play is suffused with material culture: Games are not only mediated by technical interfaces, which we access via hardware and tangible peripherals. They are also subject to material hybridization, paratextual framing, and processes of de-, and re-materialization

Playful Materialities: The Stuff That Games Are Made Of

Game culture and material culture have always been closely linked. Analog forms of rule-based play (ludus) would hardly be conceivable without dice, cards, and game boards. In the act of free play (paidia), children as well as adults transform simple objects into multifaceted toys in an almost magical way. Even digital play is suffused with material culture: Games are not only mediated by technical interfaces, which we access via hardware and tangible peripherals. They are also subject to material hybridization, paratextual framing, and processes of de-, and re-materialization