The Designer's Outpost: A Task-centered Tangible Interface for Web Site Information Design

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Research has shown that for some tasks computer input is best performed by manipulating physical objects. This project will explore the integration of paper and pixels for collaborative web design. The PI will investigate tangible and pen interaction techniques to support collocated collaboration for creating information hierarchies, as well as tools and interactions that support versioning of a physical artifact as well as manipulation of the artifact when all or part of the physical representation is unavailable. The PI will try to better understand virtual representations of a tangible information space for remote collaboration by creating a desktop GUI that allows remote users to see and manipulate the information space. He will explore the use of a "two-board UI" for hybrid tangible/virtual interaction, where designers in physically distant places can collaborate through the artifact under design. A strength of this project lies in its foundation in actual work practice, as observed by both the PI's research group and others. To insure the utility of the prototype system, the PI will conduct extensive evaluation of different areas of the system, and iterate system design based on these evaluations. He will have designers create actual information architectures on the prototype running in the lab, and will also perform long term usability studies by deploying a working prototype of the system in a web design firm. An outcome of the project will be a publicly available vision toolkit that can be used for tracking physical objects on a flat surface, and which will enable HCI researchers to create vision-based tangible user interfaces absent domain knowledge in computer vision. The work will contribute a better understanding of techniques for combining tracked physical objects with an interactive display surface, and will also contribute new techniques for collocated and remote collaboration, as well as a better understanding of the means of interacting with large, physical information architectures.