Seven Factors to Foster Creativity in University HCI Projects

This paper describes our approaches to foster creativity among students of computer science in the area of interactive virtual environments. We assume that everybody has creative potential. This potential may be covered by beliefs, experiences, and social background that hinder its use in the HCI education context. As a teacher or project coordinator, we can explicitly motivate and encourage inventive, unconventional thinking and development, give assurance, provide a supportive, save environment, and provide space to let students/co-workers discover and explore their creativity. Seven factors are identified and explained, which, in our experience, support creative, inventive thinking in HCI projects

Rendering diffuse objects using particle systems inside voxelized surface geometry

This paper presents an unique method for rendering complex shapes as fuzzy or diffuse objects inside virtual environments. It uses surface geometry that is converted into a voxel-like grid to specify the appearance of the shape. A particle system displays the outline of the object at runtime. Particles are allowed to move freely inside the voxel-grid but obtain certain attributes from the voxels they currently reside in. Those attributes assign color, size, textures, transparency to the particles, as well as forces that influence the movement of the particles. Force effects include linear and spiral movements, gravitational points, and helix-shaped motion of particles. Through this, complex movement of the particles inside the voxel-space can be created at interactive rates, while still maintaining the approximate form of the original surface geometry

Dynamic Visual Effects for Virtual Environments

We introduce a high level interface capable of instantly adding and manipulating a multitude of visual effects for any object or area in VE scenes. This enables a controlling person or an automated system to react to the in scene situation and the user’s actions by dynamically changing the scene’s appearance. Such a high-level scene and effect access is also a powerful tool for story telling engines and scene authors to support the intended plot or impact. To achieve this smoothly and effectively, our interface allows fading of effects to generate soft effect transitions and grouped effects for controlling complex effect combinations in a simple way. We also describe our fully functional implementation and the changes necessary to realize our concept in a scene graph based VR-system. We further introduce a simple script interface to add new effects to the available effect pool. We present, but are not limited to, three visual effect types: shader effects, post-processing effects, and OpenGl based effects. Our implementation supports multi-pipe displays, multi-pass rendering, and an arbitrarily deep per-object post-processing effect graph

The Card Box at Hand: Exploring the Potentials of a Paper-Based Tangible Interface for Education and Research in Art History

Conception and design of a tabletop tangible user interface to support art historians ‘ work techniques. Integration of the physical and the digital by preserving and augmenting existing work practices with images and text. User-centered approach: starting from the users needs to work with paper and “collect things as tokens, as physical memories ” [1]. Application Context The application context is the academic discipline of Art History. In education and research, art historians work intensely with large numbers of images. The investigation of the content of images, the identification, description, and interpretation of single motifs and their relation to relevant text sources constitutes a crucial part of the work. In the academic field of Art History, computer work is of gaining importance, as materials are more and more stored digitally and as the domain goes beyond photographs of artwork. Traditional GUI-based tools do not satisfactorily meet the art historians ‘ needs during the creative and intense work with many, sometimes hundreds of images. Art historians have a strong tradition of working with image cards, card boxes, and image collages (see the box about Aby Warburg below). Our approach aims to make the computer a more powerful and acceptable tool for art historians by integrating the traditional way of working with paper cards into a tabletop tangible interface. The Art Historian Aby Warburg (1866- 1929) Aby Warburg was one of the founders of modern Art History and an intensive user of card boxes. He pinned photographs on black canvases to visualize his work- at that time an innovative technique [2]