Collaboration technology and multi-user interfaces

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The proposed research is part of a multi-year program on shared display collaboration technology with two closely linked projects (a) interaction techniques for pointing and selection on large wall displays, and (b) pedagogically-motivated technology for student engagement in classrooms.******Pointing and selection on large screens. Traditional GUIs use a WIMP (windows, icons, menus, and pointers) paradigm. Pointing and selection are fundamental building blocks. Despite multi-touch, haptics, and voice input, pointing remains a significant interaction technique, especially for large displays (3m wide or more) in collaborative settings (board rooms, classrooms, and meeting/project rooms). In "mid-air" pointing a user stands in front of a display and has no surface on which to rest the pointing hand. Mid-air pointing uses laser pointers, specialized wands, and gaming devices (Nintendo Wii or Microsoft Kinect) that rely on computer vision; hybrid solutions track body movement to interpret gestures for "natural" pointing. My prior studies showed that gain (the ratio of cursor or tracker movement on the screen to hand movement) or distance from the screen (related to but not the same as gain) affect the accuracy of the standard Fitts's Law model for assessing pointing performance; my most recent paper in ACM Trans. on Computer-Human Interaction (Shoemaker et al., 2012) argued that Welford's two-part formulation that decouples movement amplitude from target width when predicting movement time is better than a one-part Fitts's Law formulation for some gain values. Our subsequent studies varied distance-to-the screen for 3D stereo targets and found similar effects when binocular depth varies. The next steps will systematically examine relationships between gain and depth in both virtual and physical environments.******In-classroom technology to increase student engagement. MOOCs are argued to be the death of the traditional classroom lecture; "flipped classrooms" re-target classroom time away from lectures toward activities usually done in tutorials or labs. I believe there are still opportunities to deploy technology to make traditional lectures "scalable" and achieve the advantages promised by MOOCs and flipped classrooms while preserving the benefits of classroom lectures. Classroom displays equivalent to the 6 to 10 full-size blackboards in a traditional lecture hall provide rich persistent information (rather than PowerPoint's ephemeral linear trickle). Imaginative interaction using simple student response systems, smart phones, or tablets can bring students "into the loop." The next steps in my research will design and evaluate class-based collaborative interaction and multi-team "competitions" to take advantage of the captivating nature of computer games (the so-called "gamification" of lectures) to provide students active learning opportunities.