Hello again from Amsterdam! This is the third post in a mutliple-post series regarding my trip to the IEEE Tabletop 2008 Conference. If you’d like, check the IEEE Tabletops Conference tag listing to view the other posts in this series.

Last night was a fantastic opportunity to sit down with some of the other conference attendees and get to know them a little better, as well as gather some insight into the general pulse of the technology, where it’s being utilized, and where it’s going. I was impressed with the mix of people that were present, and had opportunities to meet more with some of the commerical industry folks (such as Jeff Han from Perfect Pixel and the guys from SMART Technologies), as well as many academic people, including many of the participants who gave talks at the workshop that started off the conference. Heartspring falls into an interesting niche in all of that, because on the one hand we’re doing a lot of research into using the technology in ways that it hasn’t been used before, in special education. We’re taking data and observing the impact of the tech on our students. On the other hand, we go above and beyond most academic projects because we need the system to truly work in the real world. Many of the academic presentations focused on one small problem and solved it in a way that was probably feasible in real usage situations, but few had actually submitted the work to any large-scale testing. Heartspring, on the other hand, is involved in a project that must present new methods from an academic standpoint, but must also stand up to the very difficult usage situations that our classrooms often present. 

The entire dinner was aboard a boat that took us on a canal tour during the dinner, which was quite fascinating. It’s amazing the way that the canals just weave through the city, and again I was amazed by the architecture. Unfortunately, I managed to leave my camera in the hotel room (I know, I know…quite bad) so I didn’t get any photos. I intend to fully make up for this blunder, though, tomorrow. But more on that later.

Today was the third and final day of the conference, and it was just as busy as the previous day. Another 3 sessions of paper presentations, and a final keynote at the end of the day, as well. 

The first paper session centered around the theme of “Real World Applications and Experiences”. Needless to say, I was heavily anticipating this session, since I was eager to hear about some actual uses of the technology besides just the Microsoft Surface, in actual public settings. By far the most interesting talk during this session came from a group who had done an installation in a museum. The installation was a multi-touch tabletop that featured interactive information that the participants could play around with to find out more facts and other trivia about the exhibits around them. The group noticed several fascinating things about the way that the general public interacted with the display. First off, the number and diversity of gestures utilized was astounding. The team identified no less than 15 different types of “finger touches” utilized by visitors to the museum. They also observed that when visitors interacted with larger objects on the table, they tended to use multiple fingers or their entire hand. This actually seems to make sense because when interacting with physical objects, the larger the object is, the more strength (and therefore more fingers) it typically takes to move it. Would you move a pencil across your desk with the same number of fingers as your stapler? Probably not! So it was interesting that they observed a similar behavior from people interacting with the virtual objects on the display. They also found that the multi-touch tabletop facilitated far more discussion about the actual interaction that with the content. People spent the vast majority of their time at the installation discussing how to actually use it, what you could do with it, etc, and very little time actually discussing the facts or information that it was presenting. I think, and the team agreed, that this sort of “novelty” will wear off once multi-touch installations are more prevalent, but it was yet another interesting observation to keep in mind when working with this new technology.

The second session of the day centered around gesture-based manipulation of the surface objects. One team presented a paper in which they detailed ways that a high-enough resolution image capture of the “touch” on the surface could be used to realistically detect the amount of force being applied to an object. However, while I found their approach interesting, the equipment required to make it a reality is simply above and beyond anything that most people would be interested in putting into their table. It’s simply not worth adding thousands of extra dollars to the cost of a table just so you can tell how quickly someone flicked their finger, instead of just the fact that they flicked it in general. Speaking of flicking, another team presented a paper detailing a way to implement a flick “gesture”. The gesture was based around holding your forefinger to your thumb, with the rest of your fingers spread out (sort of like an “A-Okay” sign). Then, you flick with your forefinger. The computer detects the empty space presented by the circle formed in the initial part of the gesture, then based on the way the circle expands, it’s able to calculate the way and speed at which you flicked! It was an interesting concept, and I’ll be interested to see the ways that it’s implemented in multi-touch applications in the future. 

The final session of the day detailed some rather complicated ways to have different display surfaces for multi-touch surfaces. One presentation detailed the ways that you could make the image seem to be several inches above the surface of the table, so you actually interact with what appears to be a hologram. Another dealt with a term called “optical superimposition”, in which you can layer images of the tabletop on top of each other, sort of like the layers in an old physiology textbook. While I found the concepts intriguing, I also felt that they didn’t have very widely applicable uses, or that it would be something worth looking into implementing for our own project.

After the paper session, the conference pretty much wrapped up. It was a great opportunity to meet some new people, hand out some business cards, gain new insights, and learn some new tips and tricks for our own project. Well worth the trip over the ocean.

I’ll have the opportunity to do a bit of sight-seeing tomorrow during the day, and then I’ll depart for the United States from Amsterdam at 1:00 PM (GMT +2) on Sunday. So, until then!

Riley Dutton
rdutton (at) heartspring (dot) org

Hello again from Amsterdam! This is the third post in a mutliple-post series regarding my trip to the IEEE Tabletop 2008 Conference. If you’d like, check the IEEE Tabletops Conference tag listing to view the other posts in this series.

Today was the second day of the conference, and by far the most packed. The day began with an interesting keynote from Myron Krueger, both an artist and scientist who has been working with the idea of unique and alternative interfaces to computing since the 1960’s. It was amazing to see some of the things that Myron and his team were doing back when most people didn’t even know what a computer really was. We viewed tapes of old demonstrations and installations that his team created in the 70’s and 80’s, and included optical tracking of fingers, basic video conferencing from different locations, and even the idea of an interactive desktop surface nearly 3 decades before the technology was available to realize the concept. Much of the techniques that are present in modern-day interaction theory were inspired by his early work, and it was fascinating to hear his ideas and perspective on the current state of the technology. I wouldn’t even say it was a case of surprise that we have devices like the Microsoft Surface — it was more a case of “about time.”

After the keynote, we had three paper sessions consisting of 3 - 4 paper presentations each. The first session looked at the different interaction techniques present in typical tabletop applications. For example, one presentation discussed the concept of each object in the application having a “shared area”, which would be useful for interaction between the objects. The example they used involved sharing files between cellular phones placed onto the tabletop. They also presented an interesting, dynamic way for tracking the phones, using fiducials (like barcodes), only displayed on the screen of the phone itself, instead of on paper attached to the body of the phone, which is what has typically been the case. Another presentation involved the way that handoffs might occur between two users on the table. Their interaction scheme involved having the “sending” user bring the object close to a place where the “receiving” user is currently touching. As the sending user brought the object close, it increased in size, as a prompt to the receiving user. If the receiving user made a gesture toward the object, as if to take it, the object would then float from the touch of the sending user to that of the receiving user. A very nice idea to help solve the idea of sharing objects in a shared workspace.

The second session dealt with the design of the tabletop itself. There were presentations on research studies showing that multi-touch surfaces increase use participation in a group setting by leaps and bounds over single-mouse or single-touch interfaces. Not only were users more apt to jump right in and use the software, but the users also felt that the activity was less dominated by a single person. The first session also contained an interesting talk on the way that users work with objects on the tabletop surface itself. They had done an experiment using what they called “TableTrays”, a unique way of grouping tools and objects into a sort of sub-table, which allowed you to cut, copy, paste, and resize, for example, several pictures at once, instead of working with them individually. The interface certainly seemed like it would be quite useful for software which featured highly complex sets of tools, or many, many objects, which the user might want to manipulate at once, instead of only individually.

The third session dealt with actual software that was developed and used for specific purposes in a vareity of settings. One presentation showed off an application which allowed you to paint using a paint brush just as if the tabletop surface were a real canvas. The results were spectacular, and real artists created some very real art using the system. This table also featured a unique setup utilizing two different wavelengths of IR light to track both fingers and the brushes separately, allowing for some rather complicated interactions with the software. Another presentation presented a unique way of demonstrating the use of the multi-touch tabletop to beginners using what they called “TouchGhosts”, little animated guides showing first-hand how to interact with the objects on the table. This is something that our team has discussed in the past as a possibility for our own applications, so I was glad to see positive results from the presented study. Finally, the last paper presentation that I attended during this session was very interesting to our team, and it involved a basic study done with children in Kindergarten, using a prototype interactive tabletop surface. The study compared the success of the children in the same activity in both a physical and virtual setting, that of playing with a model treehouse. They found that the students had approximately the same success rate in both settings. One of the more interesting parts of the presentation was the finger positioning identified by the research team. We have also observed in our own sessions at Heartspring that children do not often interact with the table the same way as adults, instead placing their entire hand on an object, or placing most of the hand flat just above the surface, as opposed to creating a clear one-touch finger-point action like most adults seem to do. Another interesting note is that the experiment made use of a DiamondTouch table, which you may recall I discussed in my previous post, and dismissed as inadequate for our own uses. This presentation seemed to verify my initial observations, as the research team had a very difficult time getting the students to keep their feet flat on the required mat, and also experienced cases of the children moving the table and climbing on top of it try and reach far away objects. They also had issues with children leaning over the table and blocking the image, since it is projected from above the table instead of below, as our current tabletop design does.

Well, that’s about all for now. I will be attending a networking dinner tonight with the other conference participants, and then we have another full day of presentations to look forward to tomorrow. Good bye for now!

Riley Dutton
rdutton (at) heartspring (dot) org