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Abstract
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The INSITU group has developed a number of technologies, including the A-book, Prism, Knotty Gestures and the award-winning Musink, which enable users novel ways of creating their own interactive, gesture-based languages for annotating their work, both off-line and on. This thesis will continue in this line of work, with the goal of exploring the use of interactive paper for highly creative tasks, such as music composition. We are interested in shifting the boundaries of the interaction: how best to take advantage of the light-weight, intuitive nature of interacting with paper and the powerful additional functionality offered by the computer. This involves understanding both the user's perspective: just why is the early phase of creation more intuitive and fluid with paper? and the technological perspective: what kinds of tools and interaction techniques allow users to move from the early creative stages to more formal expression, supported by more traditional computer interfaces?
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Context
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Our previous research has explored how a diverse group of users, including biologists, air traffic controllers and musicians, use a complex mix of paper-based and computer-based artifacts in their work. Recent advances in technology have made it possible to create "interactive paper", in which users can both write with ink on paper and record their gestures on the computer. For example, Anoto prints an invisible pattern on paper that can be detected by a tiny camera located inside an ink pen. The resulting traces can be interpreted by a computer and linked to on-line information. Pen-based interaction with paper is fundamentally different than working on a laptop, or even a tablet computer, permiting users to easily shift between extremely informal to very formal interaction and lay out their work in space. This technology enables us to rethink the role of paper, beyond static images to an integral component of a combined tangible-electronic environment.
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Work program
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The thesis will will involve empirical participatory design work with users in the field, including interviews, interactive workshops with users to define specific needs and field studies to test novel technologies. The student will also be asked to develop novel interaction techniques using interactive paper technologies and test them, both with controlled laboratory experiments and field studies. The thesis will explore how to take optimal advantage of the benefits of interacting with each type of document, paper or electronic, while minimizing their disadvantages. The results of this research should be applicable to a variety of other creative users, including artists, scientists, and authors, and will help us to better understand how computers can be used to support creative activities.
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Extra information
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Key references:
1 Tsandilas, F. and Mackay, W. (2010) Knotty Gestures: Subtle Traces to Support Interactive Use of Paper. In Proceedings of ACM AVI 2010 Advanced Visual Interfaces, Rome, Italy.
2 Tsandilas, F., Mackay, W. and Letondal, C. (2009) Musink: Composing Music through Augmented Drawing. In Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Boston, 2009, pp.819-828.
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