Multi-touch Gestures for Surface

Chris North, Tim Dwyer, Bongshin Lee, Danyel Fisher, Petra Isenberg, George Robertson, and Kori Inkpen

Two-handed, multi-touch surface computing provides a scope for interactions that are closer analogues to physical interactions than classical windowed interfaces. This project explores the design of natural and intuitive gestures and whether familiarity with other environments influences how users approach interaction with a multi-touch surface computer.

Mischief

Neema Moraveji, Kori Inkpen, Ed Cutrell, Ravin Balakrishnan, Taemie Kim, James Ge, Udai Singh Pawar, and Kathleen Mulcahy

Mischief is a system for classroom interaction that allows multiple children to use individual mice and cursors to interact with a single large display. We also examined how children’s performance is affected as group size increases.

Embodied Social Proxies (ESP)

Gina Venolia, John Tang, George Robertson, Bongshin Lee, Kori Inkpen Quinn and Steven Drucker

“Overcoming out-of-sight and out-of-mind for remote workers” – the ESP prototype provides a physical presence to support remote colleagues’ collaborations with their team at a collocated hub. We use ESPs in our own group and are studying how other distributed teams use them. See the ESP project page for more information.

Appearance Filters for Videoconferencing

Jose Eurico de Vasconcelos Filo, Kori Inkpen, and Mary Czerwinski

Media spaces and videoconference systems are beneficial for connecting separated co-workers and providing rich contextual information. However, image sharing communication tools may also touch on sensitive spots of the human psyche related to personal, perceived image issues (e.g., appearance, self-image, self- presentation and vanity). This project examines the impact of self-image concerns on the use of media spaces and videoconference systems. Our results suggest that personal, perceived image concerns have a considerable impact on the comfort level of users and may hinder effective communication. We also found that image filtering techniques can help users feel more comfortable.

SPARCS

A.J. Bernheim Brush, Kori M. Inkpen, and Kimberly Tee

Staying in touch with extended family members can be a challenge in part because of the time and effort required, even with the help of current technologies. To explore the value of sharing suggestions in sparking communication and facilitating sharing between extended families, we iteratively built SPARCS, a prototype that encourages frequent sharing of photos and calendar information between extended families.

Family Accounts

Serge Egelman, A.J. Brush, and Kori Inkpen

This project explores how families currently use and share technologies in domestic environments. Results from this work call attention to the prevalence of shared usage of technology in domestic environments and also suggest opportunistic spaces for ubiquitous computing technology. We are also exploring Family Accounts, a new user account model for shared home computers.

Mercury

Roland Fernandez

"Components for End Users" - Visualization, Data, and UI components that users can put together without needing to write code.  Mercury comes with over 200 prebuilt components and hundreds of samples applets, including the Mercury IDE (shown here).

PipeDream

Valentina Grigoreanu, Roland Fernandez, Kori Inkpen and George Robertson

Visual designer for Mercury - PipeDream lets users build applets without programming using the Mercury library, property settings, and data and event flow between components.

WIPDash

Mikkel R. Jakobsen, Roland Fernandez, Mary Czerwinski, Kori Inkpen, Olga Kulyk, and George G. Robertson

"Work Item and People Dashboard" - A software team dashboard designed to increase awareness among team members of work item and team activities.

AniTime

George Robertson, Roland Fernandez, Danyel Fisher, Bongshin Lee and John Stasko

"What's are the best ways to discover and present trends in data?"   We built a prototype that used 3 methods of trend visualization (Animated Bubbles, Trend Trails, and Small Multiples) and tested their effectiveness for analysis and presentation in a lab study.

Multi-Display Environments

James Wallace, Regan Mandryk, Jacob Biehl, Kori Inkpen, William Baker, Brain Bailey, Desney Tan, Mary Czerwinski, Ryder Ziola, and Melanie Kellar

GroupBanter

Kori Inkpen, Steven Whittaker, Mary Czerwinski, James Wallace and Roland Fernandez

GroupBanter is a tool for supporting serendipitous group conversations using instant messaging. We investigated the potential of ephemeral group conversations by providing awareness of friends’ IM conversations, serving as an implicit invitation to join a group conversation. Results from this work show that users value this type of communication,  and that it provides new opportunities for communication that aren’t well served by traditional IM, email, or face-to-face communication.

TapGlance

Daniel C. Robbins, Bongshin Lee and Roland Fernandez

"The information you care about, at a Glance"  - a novel mobile phone UI that is customized to show the user's information, designed around 9 grids.  Each grid can be glanced at, "peeked into" for more detail (by holding a grid/key down), or interacted with (with a grid/key click).

DynaVis

Jeffrey Heer, Roland Fernandez and George Robertson

Animated Transitions in Statistical Data Graphics - we built a prototype that uses animation to improve the chart user experience, animation transitions as data and chart types change.  It also support graphic manipulation of data (moving, resizing) as well as composition of rich charts from simpler charts.

EasyThread

Roland Fernandez

"Quick and Easy Application Threading".  Are you users complaining when your application freezes while performing a long running task?  With EasyThread, a Visual Studio add-in for writing multi-threaded .NET applications, you can easily move that processing onto a background thread.  Just add a "[BgThread]" or "[FgThread]" attirbute to selected methods, and your running code can easily move between threads without having to worry about delegate, special parameters, or locks.