Human-Computer Interaction on Tabletops

The most common working situation is standing or sitting at a table, and performing daily business work. Although this situation is very intuitive to the user, a computer support can hardly be found in this area, mainly because of missing or inadequate human-computer interfaces that do not meet the expected requirements of the user. However, ongoing research in this particular field of human-computer interaction addresses this problem. The following paper shows an exemplaric research progress and gives and outlook on future research

An interactive whiteboard for immersive telecollaboration

In this paper, we present CollaBoard, a collaboration system that gives a higher feeling of presence to the local auditory and to the persons on the remote site. By overlaying the remote life-sized video image atop the shared artifacts on the common whiteboard and by keeping the whiteboard's content editable at both sites, it creates a higher involvement of the remote partners into a collaborative teamwork. All deictic gestures of the remote user are shown in the right context with the shared artifacts on the common whiteboard and thus preserve their meaning. The paper describes the hardware setup, as well as the software implementation and the performed user studies with two identical interconnected system

Construction of a Three-sided Immersive Telecollaboration System

In this article the setup and working principle of a new telecollaboration system “blue-c” is described. This system is an attempt to meet the rising expectations from industry of an IT-supported telecollaboration system. One basic requirement is that a three-dimensional representation of objects be possible together with threedimensional representations of the remote users. Since gesture and mimicry represent an important information channel during a discussion, a realistic 3D video representation is used instead of simple animated avatars. A simultaneous projection and image acquisition of the user in a telecollaboration system is necessary to allow simultaneous work of all team members. Thus, in the introduced system, problems had to be overcome such as providing, simultaneously, illumination for the image acquisition by the cameras and darkness for a bright projection to be seen by the user. A new approach was taken to integrate the cameras into the system by placing them behind active projection walls, which can be switched from transparent to opaque electrically. Unlike other systems, the cameras are therefore not visible to the user, who thus behaves more naturally. In addition, since the cameras are placed outside of the projection room, there is more space to move inside the immersive environment. The article describes the technology and functionality of the system, as well as the gathered experiences.ISSN:1054-7460ISSN:1531-326

Track access charges in the European Union railroad sector: a consideration of company organization and institutional quality

Track access charges are the main driver of infrastructure costs for rail operators in the rail transport sector, accounting for up to 88 percent of costs. This paper analyzes track access charges of 28 EU countries with the respective trajectories of the company forms employing panel regressions to unbalanced panel data for the period 2011 to 2019. As a result, a fundamental correlation between company forms and track access charges could be determined. Starting from a vertically integrated company, massive cost advantages could be identified for unbundled and partially privatized company forms by avoiding efficiency-impeding behavior. The results shed light on the European railroad packages and their national implementation