CHI Project Ideas

Here are a few ideas from the January 27th brainstorming session:

#1
Augmented Reality Virtual Interaction Space -

You use fiduciary markers to demarcate a virtual interaction space on a surface, most likely a table. You then use networked mobile devices to place virtual objects on the surface and interact with them. For example you could place a document on the surface with one device, then pick it up with another device, or interact with it on the surface.

Basically microsoft surface but virtual and displayed using augmented reality on multiple mobile devices.

The purpose of the system is to be able to create a virtual collaborative workspace on any flat surface, a real world table for example. The user's mobile devices would then act as "portals" into the virtual space by using augmented reality. If a user is a few feet away from the table and holds up their phone/pad, they see the real table but with virtual documents placed all over the table. As they move closer the documents become bigger and bigger until they place their device directly on top of where the virtual document resides in the physical space. The effect would be like putting a small picture frame over a 8.5x11 sheet of paper. The user can then pull the virtual document into their device, if they wish, and take it off of the virtual workspace. Similarly the user may take a document that resides on their device and place it into the shared virtual workspace.

The user may also edit documents directly in the virtual workspace using their device. For example, a user holds their ipad over a picture that they have placed on the workspace. They can now edit that picture through the ipad. If they wish to edit only a portion of the image they can "picture frame" a particular section of the image by placing the iPad directly onto the surface. If on the other hand they want to edit the whole image at once, they hold the ipad a little bit further away from the surface so that they can see more of the image through the picture frame, effectively getting a zoomed out view of the workspace.

This is basically an embodied 2d virtual workspace using mobile devices as both the viewer and the means of interaction.

As far as implementation goes, this would all be done by demarcating your virtual workspace on a real table with AR markers (fiduciary markers) and combining the visual location of these markers with they gyroscope in an iPhone. I do not know if this would be really possible, a subset probably is. But hey, dream big.

#2
Predictive Theories for finger/thumb interactions on tablets -

Manoj pointed out that he has had trouble finding good predictive theory on using thumb and finger interactions on tablets. This would be likely studying hand grips on tablets, sizes of tablets, how people have to hold them to perform certain tasks and what sort of limitations this places on their ability to interact with the software on the tablets.