Trent Apted’s research while affiliated with The University of Sydney and other places

New forms of natural user interfaces, particularly tabletops, are now a possibility due to the staggering advances in sensing and display technology. There is an immediate need for corresponding progress on the foundational software for exploiting the potential of these new hardware products. This requires research into natural and effective gestural interaction, with careful consideration of the core facilities needed for effective and consistent use. At the same time, an exploration of real-world tabletop applications will provide a basis for studying and advancing the core functionality. In this video, we illustrate several aspects of our ongoing research on interactive surfaces. This includes studying the core functionality of tabletops, such as gestures and interaction primitives, file access, application switching, transfer of information between devices, and user modeling for personalisation. These core functions have been used as the foundation for a number of real-world deployed applications. The key contributions of this work are the novel primitives for tabletops interaction as well as the applications that have been created by building upon them.

This paper presents the design of two tabletop file system interfaces: OriTop, a novel associative access approach to file system interaction, where users navigate multiple file systems by selecting focus files; and the Browser, a hierarchical interface that is based upon the same mental model as conventional desktop file system access. We report a qualitative study with ten users to explore both approaches. OnTop was found to better facilitate collaboration on file access and use, while the more familiar hierarchical model of the Browser was found to be more natural on very early use and has a clear role-particularly in cases where the associative approach fails.

This paper describes the design and early experience with Cruiser – a multi-user, gestural, collaborative digital photo-graph sharing interface for a tabletop – and the techniques we use to share information with devices and other displays in its pervasive computing environment. The design is strongly influenced by the metaphor of physical photographs placed on the table and we have concentrated on the pro-vision of an effective UbiComp interface that does not use a keyboard, a mouse or traditional WIMP (Windows, Icon, Mouse, Pointer) interface widgets. That is, with an emphasis on seamlessness. Aspects of the interface include the ability to interactively attach audio, handwriting or drawings, as well as other photographs to the "back" of an image after flipping it over; direct sharing of images with digital cameras, large displays and other UbiComp devices; and the provision of personal spaces – an area close to a user in which only they can work, which is enforced by the interface.

Tabletop interfaces pose special constraints and invite exploration of new ways to inter-act. This paper tackles these problems with a design approach for creating new interaction primitives for tabletops. It illustrates this in terms of the task of copying, which we argue is a core facility in tabletop interfaces. We present three mechanisms for tabletop copying and their multi-faceted but light-weight evaluation, as part of the design approach. We sum-marise the outcomes in terms of lessons for future exploration of new interaction methods for tabletops.

We have recently begun to see hardware support for the tabletop user interface, offering a number of new ways for humans to interact with computers. Tabletops offer great potential for face-to-face social interaction; advances in touch technology and computer graphics provide natural ways to directly manipulate virtual objects, which we can display on the tabletop surface. Such an interface has the potential to benefit a wide range of the population and it is important that we design for usability and learnability with diverse groups of people. This paper describes the design of SharePic - a multi- user, multi-touch, gestural, collaborative digital photograph sharing application for a tabletop - and our evaluation with both young adult and elderly user groups. We describe the guidelines we have developed for the design of tabletop interfaces for a range of adult users, including elders, and the user interface we have built based on them. Novel aspects of the interface include a design strongly influenced by the metaphor of physical photographs placed on the table with interaction techniques designed to be easy to learn and easy to remember. In our evaluation, we gave users the final task of creating a digital postcard from a collage of photographs and performed a realistic think-aloud with pairs of novice participants learning together, from a tutorial script.

Digital photography has not only changed the nature of pho- tography and the photographic process, but also the manner in which we share photographs and tell stories about them. Some traditional methods, such as the family photo album or passing piles of recently developed photos, are lost to us without requiring the digital photos to be printed. We have developed a social interface allowing people to effectively share, and tell stories about, recently taken, unsorted digital photographs around an interactive tabletop. In addition, leveraging the digital technology allows us to capture the stories told, and associate them as metadata to the appropri- ate photographs. Thus, purely as a side-effect of the social interaction, we automatically create a digital photo album annotated with stories told about each photograph, and nav- igation possibilities derived from the storytelling session.

If we can create natural interfaces to support collaborative multi-user reminiscence activities, this has potential to be of particular value for elderly people; the social interaction and mental stimulation of collaborative reminiscence offers therapeutic benefit as well as pleasure. This realisation has motivated the design of SharePic, a novel interface that exploits the natural multi-user, multi-touch DiamondTouch from Mitsubishi Electronic Research Laboratories. This paper describes the core user interaction elements of SharePic and its content as control approach to interaction. The interface design was driven by the goals of ease of learning and natural interaction, for small groups of elders to reminisce over photographic images and share them. We have performed a realistic think-aloud evaluation of SharePic with two populations, young and elders, each beginning the experiment as first time users of this style of interface. We report the comparative observations in their learning about, and use of, SharePic followed by a detailed report of the results for the elders. Central findings are that the elders were able to learn the core user interaction elements and embrace the content as control idiom, completing each of the 5 stages of the experimental task in durations 1.7 times those for the younger population. The elders succeeded in showing knowledge of the interface concepts and completing the experiment task based on a collection of images, and enjoyed using the interface. We conclude with a discussion of the significance of these findings for the advantages that interaction, such as that supported by SharePic, particularly offers for elders in reminiscence activities.

This paper describes Metasaur, which supports creation of metadata about the content of learning objects. The core of Metasaur is a visualisation for an ontology of the domain. We describe how we build lightweight ontologies for Metasaur automatically from existing dictionaries and how a user can enhance the ontology with additional terms. We report our use of Metasaur to mark up a set of audio lecture learning objects for use in a course.

This issue's Works in Progress department presents six abstracts for projects that are developing interesting solutions to the elderly's quality of life challenges. The first two abstracts discuss projects that will help provide the elderly with freedom and independence by instrumenting their environments with supportive technology. The next two abstracts discuss projects building specialized user interfaces for addressing some of the challenges associated with aging, such as vision impairment. The final two abstracts present projects that will aid independence for the elderly by providing remote monitoring and assistance.