3rd FLOOR DEMOS
UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING GROUP
PowerLine Positioning
Location – Room 330
Demo Description: PowerLine Positioning is the first example of an affordable, whole-house indoor localization system that works in the vast majority of households, scales cost-effectively to support the tracking of multiple objects simultaneously, and does not require the installation of any new infrastructure. The solution requires the installation of two small plug-in modules at the extreme ends of the home. These modules inject a mid-frequency, attenuated signal throughout the electrical system of the home. Simple receivers, or positioning tags, listen for these signals and wirelessly transmit their positioning readings back to the environment. PowerLine Positioning is capable of providing sub-room-level positioning for multiple regions of a room and has the ability to track multiple tags simultaneously.
Faculty: Gregory D. Abowd, abowd@cc.gatech.edu, Matt Reynolds
Student(s): Shwetak Patel, Erich Stuntebeck and Tom Robertson
PowerLine Event Detection
Location – Room 330
Demo Description: Activity sensing in the home has a variety of important applications, including healthcare, entertainment, home automation, energy monitoring and post-occupancy research studies. Many existing systems for detecting occupant activity require large numbers of sensors, invasive vision systems, or extensive installation procedures. This approach (Figure 14) uses a single plug-in sensor to detect a variety of electrical events throughout the home. This sensor detects the electrical noise on residential power lines created by the abrupt switching of electrical devices and the noise created by certain devices while in operation. We use machine learning techniques to recognize electrically noisy events such as turning on or off a particular light switch, a television set, or an electric stove. We tested our system in one home for several weeks and in five homes for one week each to evaluate the system performance over time and in different types of houses. Results indicate that we can learn and classify various electrical events with accuracies ranging from 85-90%.
Faculty: Gregory D. Abowd, abowd@cc.gatech.edu, Matt Reynolds
Student(s): Shwetak Patel
Information Technologies for Autism
Location – Room 330
Demo Description: We will demo three applications (Abaris, CareLog, and Baby Steps) showing how technology can be used to assist caregivers in collecting data and making decisions about the progress of children with autism and the development of newborn children.
Faculty: Gregory D. Abowd, abowd@cc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Julie Kientz, Arwa Tyebkhan and Rosa Arriaga
BuddyClock
Location – Room 330
Demo Description: BuddyClock is a social computing device that enables people in a social network to share and view each others sleeping behaviors to help friends or family members feel more connected. We will demo the alarm clock prototype we have designed and evaluated.
Faculty: Gregory D. Abowd, abowd@cc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Sunyoung Kim, Julie Kientz and Shwetak Patel
Wearable Sensing Analysis
Location – Room 330
Demo Description: Home health care monitoring has become a reality with the advent of all varieties of small wireless sensors. With this, however, comes a huge amount of data to be analyzed by the healthcare professional, much of it not of interest. In this project we attempt to automatically mark points of interest in sensor data streams. This is done by using machine learning to recognize the signature of the event of interest in sensor data streams. It is assumed that patients are monitored for discrete events of which they can be aware and can therefore confirm or reject the classifier's decisions to improve its accuracy over time. In this demo, we use wireless accelerometers to detect scratching by a patient.
Faculty: Gregory D. Abowd, abowd@cc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Erich Stuntebeck, Jaeseok, Matt Reynolds and Shwetak Patel
Work in Professional Kitchens
Location: Room 330
Demo Description: Professional kitchens are demanding environments. They are high-paced, high-volume, physically challenging and sometimes very unforgiving. Our long-term work focuses on how technology aids problem solving and creativity in these environments. In this project, we present a new spatial notation for describing workflows in professional kitchens.
Faculty: Gregory D. Abowd, abowd@cc.gatech.edu; Wendy Newstetter
Student(s): Aras Bilgen
Tableau Machine
Location – Room 330
Demo Description: Tableau Machine is a perceptive ambient reflection of home life. We set out to accomplish three primary goals. First, we want to de-familiarize the rhythms of everyday home life to elicit reflections and conversations between members of the household. Second, we want to encourage long term engagement. Third, we want the machine to be perceived as a presence. Tableau Machine consists of two modules: an activity characterizer and an art generator. The characterizer is a vision system aggregating motion over places of interest into three proxies to the rhythms of everyday life: social energy, density, and flow. The generator maps these proxies into novel visual compositions. We present the system design and a comparative evaluation of two six-week deployments of Tableau Machine in area households.
Faculty: Gregory Abowd, abowd@cc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Mario Romero, Adam Smith, Zach Pousman
Supporting Remote Parent-Child Interaction
Location – Room 330
Demo Description: While computer-mediated communication has a long history of exploration in HCI, relatively little effort has focused on its application to remote parenting. We describe a design process that led to the development and preliminary evaluation of the ShareTable, a video-conferencing system that supports shared interaction with physical objects. Our experience resulted in a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities for computer-mediated remote parenting, which we summarize through a set of design implications intended to influence development in this area. We will also discuss our current and future research in supporting remote parent-child interaction.
Faculty: Gregory D. Abowd, abowd@cc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Lana Yarosh
EVERYDAY COMPUTING LAB
Will the Real Cameraphone Please Stand Up?
Location: Room 334
Demo Description: In this research, we conducted empirical studies of MMS and camera phone use and explored the many different identities and interpretations people have constructed of their cameraphones. These interpretations are strongly related to how people do or do not choose to use their cameraphones. We further investigated what influenced people to construct the interpretations that they did and used this insight both to suggest design implications for future generations of cameraphones as well as to formulate a technological hermeneutic -- an initial theory of how people interpret technology.
Faculty: Elizabeth Mynatt, mynatt@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Amy Voida
Social Methods for Useable Privacy and Security
Location: Room 334
Demo Description: End-users are increasingly tasked with managing their digital privacy and security, and users very often perform these tasks individually. We are exploring interfaces that help end-users manage their digital privacy/security via lightweight collaboration. We have built prototype privacy/security management interfaces that enable an individual to observe how other people in her community are managing their privacy/security and use this information to help her manage her privacy/security. An individual can use this information to maintain awareness of privacy/security risks, learn about risks, and make decisions regarding management of risks. Data aggregation plays a key role in our interfaces as well.
Faculty: Elizabeth Mynatt, mynatt@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Jeremy Goecks
MAHI: Facilitating Reflection in Individual Diabetes Management
Location: Room 334
Demo Description: In many situations in life, people learn by reflecting on results of their past choices and actions. In case of chronic diseases, such as diabetes, reflection-inaction helps individuals make more informed decisions regarding personal disease management. By reflecting on the health impact of their past actions individuals learn to tune their lifestyle choices to keep diabetes under control.
MAHI (Mobile Access to Health Information) is designed as a technology probe to both help us study reflection-in-action as it happens in course of individuals' daily lives and to facilitate it by enabling capture and access to past activities and their health impact. MAHI is a distributed mobile application that utilizes a mobile phone's media features to allow easy capture of activity records through verbal descriptions and pictures. At the same time, a glucose meter connected with the phone via Bluetooth helps individuals capture impact of recorded activities on their blood sugar. Individuals can reflect on their records and discuss them with peers and healthcare providers while viewing them on a password-protected website.
Faculty: Elizabeth Mynatt, mynatt@cc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Lena Mamykina, Daniel Greenblatt
inSPACE DEMOS
inSpace Display
Location: Lab Room 334
Demo Description: The inSpace Display is a service for meeting rooms that enables participants to place live content from their laptops on a common, large display. The areas we are currently interested in studying are first, how to effectively design and deploy virtual services to preserve the social interactions that existed with the physical interfaces being replaced; i.e. what happens when the projector is no longer tethered to a VGA cable? The second line of inquiry is how to identify and design for different types of meetings. Leader-led meetings have different needs and social constraints than a democratic design meeting. When considering technology for multi-use space it is imperative that it be flexible without adding overhead to the management of the room. The inSpace Display is being built as a platform to enable investigation into service-rich workplaces so that we may better understand how to merge technology with existing social phenomena.
Faculty: W. Keith Edwards, (404) 385-6783, keith@cc.gatech.edu
Students: Christopher A. Le Dantec, Puja Verma, Benjamin McMillan
Giornata
Location: Room 334
Demo Description: Giornata demonstrates how the traditional desktop metaphor can be dramatically re-envisioned to better match knowledge workers' practices by emphasizing activity and informal tagging as primary organizing principles in the interface. When using the system, the enhanced desktop serves not only as a display space for application windows, but also as an active folder for documents and other information items associated with the current activity. Giornata also features lightweight activity- and document-tagging capabilities that can be used for informal and evolutionary resource organization and collaboration tools intended to support group information sharing and activity awareness.
Faculty: Elizabeth Mynatt, mynatt@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Steven Voida
inSpace Table Interaction
Location: Room 333
Demo Description: The inSpace table provides a platform for meeting activities that allows the participants to just place devices or objects on the table in order to bring them into context for the rest of the system. The system recognizes the items on the table, and provides ambient feedback on activity associated with those devices. The system also associates meaning to touch based gestures made on the table, thus providing an environment where the physical architecture follows the natural dynamics of interaction.
Faculty: W. Keith Edwards, keith@cc.gatech.edu, Ali Mazalek, mazalek@gatech.edu
Student(s): Meekal Bajaj, Manvesh Vyas, Andy Wu
WORK2PLAY LAB
Home and Household
Location: Work2Play Lab, Room 335A
Demo Description: We are investigating how householders setup, maintain and troubleshoot their home networks to determine how to make networking easier. Our previous work found that the built environment plays a large part in how householders approach home networking. In our follow up study, we expand our definition of households with "families" to include single-sex and single-parent homes. In addition, our focus is shifting to how householders approach network maintenance and monitoring activities in particular.
Faculty: Beki Grinter, beki@cc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Marshini Chetty www.cc.gatech.edu/~marshini
Socially & Culturally Situated Technology to Encourage Healthy Eating Practices
Location: Work2Play Lab, Room 335A
Demo Description: Our research focuses on designing technologies that encourage healthy eating in specific cultural contexts. In particular, we are examining how eating practices are socially and culturally influenced within low-income African American communities.
Our research is motivated by the fact that this segment of the population experiences a disproportionate amount of diet-related related health problems. We will present preliminary results from a study in which we used 1) focus groups to understand individuals’ attitudes towards health, their existing knowledge about healthy eating, and their experience with trying to maintain a healthy diet and 2) inspiration card workshops (a participatory design method) to gain further design ideas.
Faculty: Beki Grinter, beki@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Andrea Grimes
Sun Dial: Exploring Techno-Spiritual HCI through a Mobile Islamic Call to Prayer Application
Location: Work2Play Lab, Room 335A
Demo Description: We present Sun Dial, an application that supports Muslims’ prayer practices, and an exploration in techno-spiritual design. We report two studies: the first involves identifying prayer as an activity that can be supported with technology; the initial development of a prototype; and application of our mobile phone-based system. We then describe a longer term evaluation of Sun Dial conducted with our local Muslim community. Our findings point to the role images can play in connecting people with their faith, and how the role of time in Islamic prayer led us to a deeper understanding of alternative displays of time information. We conclude by discussing what techno-spiritual design and evaluation has to offer the HCI community.
Faculty: Beki Grinter, beki@cc.gatech.edu
Students: Susan Wyche, Kelly Caine, Ben Davison, Shwetak Patel, and Micheal Arteaga
Re-Placing Faith: Reconsidering the Secular-Religious Use Divide in the United States and Kenya
Location: Work2Play Lab, Room 335A
Demo Description: In this poster, we report on design-oriented fieldwork and design research conducted over a six-month period in urban centers in the United States (USCITY) and Kenya (Nairobi). The contributions of this work for the CHI/CSCW community are empirical and methodological. First, we describe how recent design discourse around “designing technology for religion” creates an artificial distinction between instrumental and religious purposes, particularly in developing regions. As illustrative examples, we relate three themes developed in the course of our fieldwork, which we term mindfulness, watchfulness, and embeddedness, to both “secular” and “religious” aspects of life in Kenya. Second, we make a methodological contribution by presenting sketching as an analytical tool. Using a portfolio of design drawings produced in the course of our Kenyan fieldwork, we describe some of our successes and failures in engaging our participants in ongoing design conversation.
Faculty: Beki Grinter, beki@cc.gatech.edu; Paul M. Aoki (Intel Research, Berkeley)
Students: Susan Wyche
"Roomba Study": How We Live with Robots at Home
Location: Work2Play Lab, Room 335A
Demo Description: Robots have entered our domestic lives to serve as pets, caretakers and cleaners. However, little is known about their long-term impact at home. How do robots influence the domestic labor, routines and perception to other robotic technologies? In this study, I have distributed 30 Roombas, a vacuuming robot designed by iRobot, to households to learn how they incorporate the robot into their daily lives over a six-month-period.
Faculty: Beki Grinter, beki@cc.gatech.edu; Henrik I. Christensen, hic@cc.gatech.edu
Students: Ja-Young Sung, Ph.D in Human-Centered Computing
Using Visual Analysis to Augment Digital Repository Search Interfaces
Location – Room 335A
Demo Description: We have created the Human-Centered Computing Education Digital Library (HCC EDL) and the Visual Analytics Digital Library (VADL) for use by the worldwide HCC/Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and VA communities. The HCC EDL and VADL serve as useful resources to institutions without established HCI or VA curricula and provide research platforms for empirical work on digital library design. We use them to investigate how visualization can augment digital library search interfaces: we have enhanced their keyword engines with a treemap-based visualization we call a ResultMap.
Faculty: Jim Foley, jim.foley@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Edward Clarkson
Evaluating Web Lectures as an Alternative Approach to Education: A Case Study from HCI
Location: Room 335A
Demo Description: We are using web lectures to enhance the classroom learning experience in an introductory HCI course. By using web lectures to present lecture material before class, more in-class time can be spent engaging students with authentic learning activities-using class time for more learning by doing, less learning by listening. A quasi-experiment was conducted over a 15-week semester with 46 students in two sections of the same course: one section using web lectures and one using traditional lectures. Many control measures were in place, including each section being taught by the same instructor and blind grading. The web lecture section's grades were significantly higher than the traditional lecture section, and web lecture students reported increasingly strong positive attitudes about the intervention. Our twofold contribution is a novel use of existing technology to improve learning, and a longitudinal study of its use within the context of HCI education.
Faculty: James Foley,(404) james.foley@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Jason Day
Experimental Investigation of Multimodal Learning with Web Lectures
Location: Room 335A
Demo Description: We conducted a controlled laboratory experiment to determine the effects variously moded educational materials on learning, and to investigate whether multimedia educational materials support student work practices. Cognitive Load Theory and the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning were the theoretical underpinnings for our hypothesis, that the combination of presentation modes utilized by web lectures is more educationally effective than other combinations of modes presenting the exact same information, based on posttest performance. Our investigation of student work practice support was guided by modeling our educational system using a cognitive engineering method called Work Action Analysis. Sixty volunteer participants were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions: video+audio+PPT (web lecture), audio+PPT, PPT+transcript, and PPT-only. Our hypothesis was confirmed-the web lecture condition performed statistically significantly better on the posttest than all other conditions. Moreover, subjective measures indicated that participants perceived web lectures as more educationally effective than the other conditions. Surveys also indicated web lecture use is consonant with most current work practices, and provided subjective support for the value-added of video to educational materials.
Faculty: James Foley, james.foley@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Jason Day
Design for Development
Location – Room 335A
Demo Description: Can the internet help to heal a nation? Can a cybercafe help create jobs and build an economy? Can we design a computer system that does not require print or computer literacy? This project aims to create and to study computer and communication systems for low income countries. We are working in Africa and Asia on action research projects with the aim of social, political and economic development. Working with Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission we are debuting a new website that supports formal statement taking and design for a rural information kiosk to encourage post-conflict truth telling and reconciliation. In Kyrgyzstan we have been studying cyber cafes' impact on rural economic activities.
Faculty: Michael L. Best, mikeb@cc.gatech.edu
Students: John Etherton, Parker McGee, Dhanaraj Thakur, David Terraso, Thomas Smythe, Daniel Serrano, Hasan Abbasi, Corbin Lee Pon
CONTEXTUALIZED SUPPORT FOR LEARNING
Art or Circus? Characterizing User-Created Video on YouTube
Location: Room 340
Demo Description: The proliferation of digital cameras and media editing software in consumer households has led to the democratization of multimedia content authoring. Despite access to digital media productions tools, consumer created content tends not to resemble professional artifacts. In this paper we explore this disparity by analyzing the popular content on the video sharing site YouTube to determine (1) the extent to which novice and professional artifacts differ and (2) how research in the user-created content domain can help reduce this disparity.
Faculty: Mark Guzdial, guzdial@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Brian M. Landry
Georgia Computes!
Location: Room 340
Demo Description: Georgia Computes! is an NSF "Broadening Participation in Computing" alliance focused on increasing the number and diversity of computing students in the state of Georgia. The goal of this effort is to improve the computing education pipeline across the state of Georgia. Some of our outreach efforts include attracting girls into computing with activities in camps and after school programs with our partners, the Girl Scout Council of Northwest Georgia and the YWCA of Georgia, offering summer camps to middle and high school students, teaching high school educators how to teach computing using motivating examples, and offering workshops to University System of Georgia computing faculty on new approaches to motivate computing education.
Faculty: Mark Guzdial, guzdial@cc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Jill Dimond
Media Computation with JES: A Gallery of Student Creations
Location: Room 340
Demo Description: Recent work has shown that computing education needs to be relevant, creative, social, and results-oriented in order to bring in larger numbers of students. To meet this challenge, the introductory course in the "Introduction to Media Computation" sequence has a focus on learning to program to manipulate media. Students reduce red eye, create ticker tape movies of CNN headlines, splice and reverse sounds, create synthesizers, implement chromakey and put ourselves on the moon. To complete these tasks, students use JES (Jython Environment for Students), a student-friendly IDE with built-in functions to assist in media manipulation. We will present a gallery of student-created media and the methods the students used to do such amazing work.
Faculty: Mark Guzdial, guzdial@cc.gatech.edu
Students: Brian O'Neill
Factors that Influence CS Teacher’s Adoption and Change
Location: Room 340
Demo Description: To make CS educational innovations have real-world impact, it is critical that we refine our understanding of what factors are most important for shaping the way(s) that our innovations are adopted, adapted, and implemented. Since each innovation that is concerned with changing the curriculum or changing the tools needs teachers to carry it out, the aim of this work is to explore factors that influence CS teachers’ adoption of curriculum innovations, which might illuminate how to improve workshops as well as providing a basis for researchers to devise effective strategies of removing barriers that prevent CS teachers’ adoption & change.
We propose a theoretical model to represent our hypotheses regarding teachers’ adoption factors and conducted a pilot study to examine those factors through several summer workshops on innovative approaches of teaching introductory CS. We distributed surveys to get information about teachers’ adoption concerns, based on which we predicted their possible decisions of adopting any approach from the workshops. Furthermore, we distributed follow-up surveys to collect teachers’ actual adoption decisions and compared them with our predictions.
Faculty: Mark Guzdial, guzdial@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Lijun Ni
Computer Science Education for End-User Programmers
Location – Room 340
Demo Description: Recent estimates for the number of end-user programmers indicate this population is over four times larger than the community of professional programmers. Native scripting capabilities have now become integrated with media manipulation tools like Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, and Blender. Such new support for end-user programming creates many opportunities for researchers. This research is an effort to enable us to gain a deeper understanding of how and why media professionals, like graphic designers, learn to script. Specifically, we are interested in what they know about Computer Science, how they learned it, and how we might support newcomers in learning Computer Science content informally.
Faculty: Mark Guzdial, guzdial@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Brian Dorn
Introductory Computer Science Understanding
Location – Room 340
Demo Description - Computer science has long debated what to teach in the introductory course of the discipline, and many leaders in our field believe that the introductory course approach is critical to student development. We are interested in exploring how students come to understand computing, and shifting the focus of the conversation from a curricular and pedagogical perspective to a perspective grounded in learning and learning theory. How do students actually experience and learn from the curricula and in the learning environments that we design? We are focusing on introductory computing concepts, and specifically exploring the question of how the context of alternate introductory courses impacts student learning of programming concepts.
Faculty: Mark Guzdial, guzdial@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Allison Elliott Tew
Introducing Diversity Research Lab Initiatives
Location: 339A
Demo Description: Diversity is a collection of people, teams, majors, departments, functions, processes, policies and qualities characterized by both similarities and differences. This poster will present several projects underway in the new Diversity Research Lab that help us understand more fully pipeline issues and a variety of diversity related elements in computing.
Faculty: Maureen Biggers, Kwok Tsui, David Goldsman
Students: Yuba Yilmaz, Anne Brauer, Betsy DiSalvo, Jill Dimond, Sara Brynn Hudgins, Ronald Stevens
INFORMATION INTERFACES LAB
Jigsaw: Visualization for Investigative & Intelligence Analysis
Location: Room 342A
Demo Description: We are developing a system called Jigsaw that helps people browse large collections of text documents (reports) in order to discover embedded plots, stories, and connections across the documents. Jigsaw is an information visualization and visual analytics system useful for human-centered interactive exploration of the documents to assist information foraging and sense-making. Jigsaw provides a collection of visualizations that each portray different aspects of the reports. Specifically, the system visualizes important entities extracted from the text documents and it allows the analyst to explore and browse connections among the entities. We won the 2007 IEEE VAST Symposium Contest using Jigsaw as our analysis tool.
Faculty: John Stasko, stasko@cc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Zhicheng Liu, Vasili Panatazopoulos, Gennadiy Stepanov, Sarah Williams, Carsten Goerg, goerg@cc.gatech.edu
LEARNING BY DESIGN LAB
Kitchen Science Investigators
Location: LBD Lab, Room 346
Demo Description: Kitchen Science Investigators (KSI) is a research endeavor, aimed at creating an after-school environment where elementary and middle school children learn from everyday experiences. Learners actively participate in cooking and baking with the goal of learning scientific principles behind successful cooking and reasoning skills for revising and adapting recipes. We aim to promote learning in this environment that can be transferred to other places and experiences. We aim too to help learners come to see themselves as scientific reasoners and thinkers.
Software is used in this environment in two ways: (1) to help learners plan and stop and reflect on the science they are learning and (2) to help learners write about their experiences so as to be able to share what they are doing and have learned with others both inside and outside of the KSI community (e.g. family, friends, teachers, etc.). The second aim is achieved through providing a framework and help with writing articles for a cooking e-magazine. They can contribute stories, instructions to others, and explanatoids (little snippets about how and why something works and how to use it). The software provides help with organizing their thoughts and attaching illustrations. Because the participants want to be able to learn cooking from what they are doing and because they want to be able to write up their experiences well, they are willing to use other software for planning and keeping records. The planning and record-keeping software supports whole-group/class planning, planning by small groups, note-taking by small groups, and viewing results across groups, affording the kinds of external memory artifacts needed for coherent whole-group discussions about what they are learning and how to apply that in new situations. In these ways, the software provides both social and cognitive affordances for learning from their experiences, collaborating coherently, and making what participants are doing and learning available for others to see and value. Web: http://home.cc.gatech.edu/tlclegg/14
Faculty: Janet Kolodner, jlk@cc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Tamara Clegg, Christina Gardner
Jacket's Garage: Simulation Software that Provides Scaffolding for Exploration and Explanation in the context of Design-Based Science Learning
Location: LBD Lab – Room 346
Demo Description: We aim to help middle school science learners come to deeply understand complex science concepts and to use what they are learning in scientific explanations. Our software, Jacket's Garage, is designed to be used in conjunction with a design-based science curriculum, where learners learn science in the context of designing working devices. Jacket's Garage is the third generation of software we've designed for this purpose. It is integrated into a Hovercraft curriculum used in an after-school informal education context. Students learn about forces and motion, air flow, aerodynamics, and electricity in the context of designing a series of small hovercraft. For each design challenge, they first explore using the physical materials, generating questions they need to find answers to for their hovercraft to work the way they want. The software then allows them to explore possibilities and run experiments to answer their questions. It guides them, as well, in generating explanations that include science concepts in them. They take what they've learned back to the real world as they design their hovercrafts. The software allows exploration of more possibilities than are possible in the world. It allows them to do careful comparisons in experiments and to race their virtual hovercrafts.
The demonstration will focus on highlighting the affordances that the software provides for the students to (a) explore the physical realm of hovercraft science and (b) construct scientific explanations using an explanation template.
Faculty: Janet Kolodner, jlk@cc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Kim Weaver, Meghna Singh, Hemanth Pai, Jin Ah Chon, Ganesh Bhat
SYNAESTHETIC MEDIA LAB
TTT: Tangible Tracking Table
Location: Synlab, Room 333
Demo Description: An interactive tabletop display that allows multiple fingertip tracking and tangible object tracking. The table can be used for a range of digital media applications in collaborative settings such as meeting rooms, classrooms and living rooms. The demo shows our current technology prototype. Applications under development include games and storytelling engines, as well as a stage manager for machinima creation.
Faculty: Ali Mazalek, mazalek@gatech.edu; Keith Edwards, keith@cc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Andy Wu, Meekal Bajaj, Manvesh Vyas
BioBrowser and Tiltable Maps
Location: Synlab, Room 333
Demo Description: A horizontal tilting table is used to navigate information spaces, such as biological information and geographical maps.
Faculty: Ali Mazalek, mazalek@gatech.edu
Student(s): Hyun Jean Lee, Gaurav Gupta
Behavior Traits from Sketches (BETS)
Location: Synlab, Room 333
Demo Description: The ideomotor model from cognitive science hypothesizes that when humans perceive and imagine movements, their motor system is activated implicitly. The preferences and biases of our own movements thus guide how we perceive and imagine actions. BETS is a software tool developed to investigate and exploit ideomotor effects and supports the development of novel computational media applications.
Faculty: Ali Mazalek, mazalek@gatech.edu
Student(s): Yanfeng Chen
Collaborators: Sanjay Chandrasekharan (University of Calgary), Brent Strickland (Georgia State University)
Kino-Puzzle
Location: Synlab, Room 333
Demo Description: The expressive power of the collage surface are combined with the representational flexibility of digital databases and tangible interaction methods to present new documentary forms in the digital age.
Faculty: Ali Mazalek, mazalek@gatech.edu
Student(s): Susan Robinson, Daniel Razza
RENATI
Location: Synlab, Room 333
Demo Description: Recontextualizing short stories using tangible interface technologies. The focus is on the design of a narrative for traditional film/video screen presentation and then its redesign for tangible interactive experiences.
Faculty: Ali Mazalek, mazalek@gatech.edu
Student(s): Ayoka Chenzira, Yanfeng Chen
TUI-3D
Location: Synlab, Room 333
Demo Description: The TUI-3D puppet demonstrates how a puppet interface can control a character in Unreal in real-time, to combine 3D interactive performance spaces with intuitive control mechanisms enabled by tangible interface techniques.
Faculty: Ali Mazalek, mazalek@gatech.edu; Michael Nitsche, michael.nitsche@lcc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Evan Mandel, Dinesh Nagar, Shashank Raval, Tandav Sanka, Ashish Singal
Tangible Comics
Location: Synlab, Room 333
Demo Description: Comics' conventions are extended into 3D space with real-time interactions. The distorted self-projections of participants become characters of a dramatic experience, which at the end provides a traditional comic strip based on snapshots that were taken throughout.
Faculty: Ali Mazalek, mazalek@gatech.edu
Student(s): Yanfeng Chen, Ozge Samanci
Spinning3D
Location: Synlab, Room 333
Demo Description: Spinning3D allow users to view museum artifacts, e.g. a Greek vase, closely and from all angles. The viewer spins a two-sided display equipped with touch screen functionality to interact with the digital model of the artifact.
Faculty: Ali Mazalek, mazalek@gatech.edu
Student(s): Kirti Goel, Hyun Jean Lee, Heerin Lee
Machinima Pre-visualization
Location: Room 333
Demo Description: Is Machinima technology is useful for pre-vis? And can it provide a fast and stable and accessible real-time platform for TV and film pre-production? We work on camera control and real-time pre-visualization, testing different real-time 3D engines (Unreal Tournament, Blender, Virtools).
Faculty: Michael Nitsche, michael.nitsche@lcc.gatech.edu, Ali Mazalek, mazalek@gatech.edu
Student: Evan Mandel
Playviz
Location: Room 333
Demo Descripton - Playvis is a pre-visualization and fundamental machinima production tool. Playvis tracks the camera position in Unreal Tournament, logs the data in an own text file, and provides a simple Flash-like editor to arrange different camera perspectives. Player can set up and arrange a wide range of cameras in the editor using Unreal as a real-time monitor. The scene itself stays real-time 3D. Info: http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/machinima/projects_Playvis/index.html
Faculty: Michael Nitsche, michael.nitsche@lcc.gatech.edu
Student: Courtland Goodson
AUGMENTED ENVIRONMENTS LAB
Augmenting Reality with Second Life
Location – 3rd Floor Foyer
Demo Description: In this project, we are exploring how to leverage the power of MMOs for authoring and deploying augmented reality systems and experiences. We have created a custom client for the MMO Second Life (SL) that integrates augmented reality technologies, including living video capture and various tracking systems, and a set of in-world objects and conventions that allow us to align a part of the SL virtual world with an area of the physical world. The result is a mixed media environment where physical humans and virtual avatars meet and interact with physical and virtual objects.
Beyond studying how an MMO can be used to create AR experiences, we are exploring specific genres of experience that seem particularly appropriate to this configuration of technology. Initially, we are exploring both movie creation (a kind of "AR Machinima") and performance studies. This demo will focus on performance and the dramatic possibilities that open up with such a system.
Faculty: Blair MacIntyre, Jay Bolter, Michael Nitsche, Kathryn Farley
Students: Tobias Lang (visiting from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich)
Handheld Augmented Reality Games
Location: Room 333
Demo Description: In this project, we are exploring how to create augmented reality games using handheld devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs or handheld game consoles. We are particularly interested in multi-player games that combine the power of computer games (i.e., continuous simulation and gameplay) with the social aspects of board and card games (i.e., easy flow between social activities and game play, understanding what other players are doing by watching their actions). We will demonstrate a prototype game called Bragfish that was designed with these goals in mind. We will also demonstrate other handheld AR game technologies and concepts we have been developing.
Faculty: Blair MacIntyre, Jay Bolter, Maribeth Gandy
Students: Sami Deen (MS CS), Yan Xu (HCC PhD), Ta Huynh Duy Nguyen (HCC PhD), Karthik Ravaeendran (MS CS), Jacquelyn Piette (MS LCC)
AR/Presence
Location: Room 333
Demo Description: Presence is a concept currently used in the VR community to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of virtual environments. Presence is defined as the “sense of being there” or, more appropriate for our purposes, “a perceptual illusion of non-mediation”. In this project, we are investigating presence for use in AR evaluation. In this first phase we are exploring what this concept means in a mixed reality setting, how existing ....measurement techniques such as questionnaires and physiological sensing can be applied to AR applications, and whether existing data regarding immersion factors and presence translate to the AR domain. Our first experiment recreates the virtual “pit” experiment done at UNC in AR with the goal of producing similar physiological effects on the study participants. The overall goal of this work is to generate evaluation techniques for AR as well as to begin defining design and usability guidelines for the creation of effective AR experiences.
Faculty: Maribeth Gandy,maribeth.gandy@imtc.gatech.edu; Blair MacIntyre, blair@cc.gatech.edu ; Richard Catrambone, rc7@prism.gatech.edu; Jay Bolter, jay.bolter@lcc.gatech.edu
Student: Chris Alvarez
DART the Dog
Location: Room 333
Demo Description: The capabilities of mobile devices have recently advanced to the point where it is practical to create augmented reality (AR) experiences for them. Portable gaming systems and mobile phones now have high-end 3D-graphics capability, high resolution video cameras, a large amount of storage etc. And therefore we have begun experimenting with how to leverage these capabilities for AR gaming. There are not many design guidelines or paradigms for mobile AR gaming so we are currently exploring the design space of mobile AR games by creating prototypes to evaluate our ideas. One of these prototypes is "DART the Dog." More "toy" than "game", DART the Dog illustrates some of the capabilities of a mobile AR experience and allows us to experiment with interface designs.
Faculty: Jay Bolter, jay.bolter@lcc.gatech.edu; Maribeth Gandy, maribeth.gandy@imtc.gatech.edu; Blair MacIntyre, blair@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Brian Schrank
Demo Index
