Bimanual marking menu for near surface interactions

ABSTRACT We describe a mouseless, near-surface version of the Bimanual Marking Menu system. To activate the menu system, users create a pinch gesture with either their index or middle finger to initiate a left click or right click. Then they mark in the 3D space near the interactive area. We demonstrate how the system can be implemented using a commodity range camera such as the Microsoft Kinect, and report on several designs of the 3D marking system. Like the multi-touch marking menu, our system offers a large number of accessible commands. Since it does not rely on contact points to operate, our system leaves the nondominant hand available for other multi-touch interactions

TreeJuxtaposer: scalable tree comparison using Focus+Context with guaranteed visibility

Structural comparison of large trees is a difficult task that is only partially supported by current visualization techniques, which are mainly designed for browsing. We present TreeJuxtaposer, a system designed to support the comparison task for large trees of several hundred thousand nodes. We introduce the idea of “guaranteed visibility”, where highlighted areas are treated as landmarks that must remain visually apparent at all times. We propose a new methodology for detailed structural comparison between two trees and provide a new nearly-linear algorithm for computing the best corresponding node from one tree to another. In addition, we present a new rectilinear Focus+Context technique for navigation that is well suited to the dynamic linking of side-by-side views while guaranteeing landmark visibility and constant frame rates. These three contributions result in a system delivering a fluid exploration experience that scales both in the size of the dataset and the number of pixels in the display. We have based the design decisions for our system on the needs of a target audience of biologists who must understand the structural details of many phylogenetic, or evolutionary, trees. Our tool is also useful in many other application domains where tree comparison is needed, ranging from network management to call graph optimization to genealogy

ProofRite: A Paper-Augmented Word Processor

Proofreading digital documents on paper is a common pattern of use among word processor users [7]. Yet, at present, there are no word processing programs that let users merge information gathered on a printout back into the digital version of the document. In this paper we present ProofRite, an extended version of the AbiWord word processor [1], which lets users merge annotations and markings made on a printout with the original digital version of a document. Upon merging, marks are anchored in the document such that they can reflow with the text they are attached to. ProofRite showcases the first full implementation of the Paper Augmented Digital Document system [4] and shows how cohabitation between the digital and the paper world might simplify user workflow in many office-related tasks