Instrumental Interaction in Multisurface Environments

Position paper for the TEI 2015 workshop on Interactive InfrastructuresFor the past few years, we have been working on developing infrastructure and applications for interactive rooms that include large, wall-sized displays, tabletops, laptops, tablets and other interaction devices, such motion tracking devices. Our goal is to create the next generation of interactive systems that will support collaborative, distributed interaction over a range of devices and environments. We have worked extensively with " extreme " users who need such environments to deal with large and complex datasets, using participatory design to understand their need and prototype solutions. Our WILD 1 room [5] features a 130-million pixel wall-sized display made of 32 30 " monitors and powered by a 16-computer cluster, a 10-camera VICON motion tracking system, an FTIR tabletop and a variety of devices such as tablets, smartphones and wireless pointing devices. WILD is part of a network of 10 interactive rooms developed by the Digiscope project. All rooms feature large display surfaces and rich interaction devices. Two are immersive CAVEs; the others feature power walls with varying resolutions and sizes. Some have 3D capability; others are touch-enabled. The 10 rooms are interconnected with a telepresence system designed to support rich remote collaboration. This unique infrastructure provides us with a rich testbed for experimenting with interaction techniques and interaction models for distributed interfaces. It also raises challenging technical issues for environments where devices interoperate smoothly and where configurations can be easily defined, stored and recalled

Hydrascope: Creating Multi-Surface Meta-Applications Through View Synchronization and Input Multiplexing

International audienceAs computing environments that combine multiple displays and input devices become more common, the need for applications that take advantage of these capabilities becomes more pressing. However, few applications are designed to support such multi-surface environments. We investigate how to adapt existing applications without access to their source code. We introduce HydraScope, a framework for transforming existing web applications into meta-applications that execute and synchronize multiple copies of applications in parallel, with a multi-user input layer for interacting with it. We describe the Hydra-Scope architecture, validated with five meta-applications

Rapid Development of User Interfaces on Cluster-Driven Wall Displays with jBricks

International audienceResearch on cluster-driven wall displays has mostly focused on techniques for parallel rendering of complex 3D models. There has been comparatively little research effort dedicated to other types of graphics and to the software engineering issues that arise when prototyping novel interaction techniques or developing full-featured applications for such displays. We present jBricks, a Java toolkit that integrates a high-quality 2D graphics rendering engine and a versatile input configuration module into a coherent framework, enabling the exploratory prototyping of interaction techniques and rapid development of post-WIMP applications running on cluster-driven interactive visualization platforms