Browsing by Author "Gutwin, C."
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Item Metadata only Air pointing: Design and evaluation of spatial target acquisition with and without visual feedback(Elsevier, 2011) Cockburn, A.; Quinn, P.; Gutwin, C.; Ramos, G.; Looser, J.Sensing technologies such as inertia tracking and computer vision enable spatial interactions where users make selections by ‘air pointing’: moving a limb, finger, or device to a specific spatial region. In addition of expanding the vocabulary of possible interactions available, air pointing brings the potential benefit of enabling ‘eyes-free’ interactions, where users rely on proprioception and kinaesthesia rather than vision. This paper explores the design space for air pointing interactions, and presents tangible results in the form of a framework that helps designers understand input dimensions and resulting interaction qualities. The framework provides a set of fundamental concepts that aid in thinking about the air pointing domain, in characterizing and comparing existing solutions, and in evaluating novel techniques. We carry out an initial investigation to demonstrate the concepts of the framework by designing and comparing three air pointing techniques: one based on small angular ‘raycasting’ movements, one on large movements across a 2D plane, and one on movements in a 3D volume. Results show that large movements on the 2D plane are both rapid (selection times under 1 s) and accurate, even without visual feedback. Raycasting is rapid but inaccurate, and the 3D volume is expressive but slow, inaccurate, and effortful. Many other findings emerge, such as selection point ‘drift’ in the absence of feedback. These results and the organising framework provide a foundation for innovation and understanding of air pointing interaction.Item Open Access Collected Posters from the Nectar Annual General Meeting.(2008-01-07) Greenberg, S.; Brush, A. J.; Carpendale, S.; Diaz-Marion, R.; Elliot, K.; Gutwin, C.; McEwan, G.; Neustaedter, C.; Nunes, M.; Smale, S.; Tee, K.This report collects eight posters produced by students and associates of the Grouplab Research Group (Dept. Computer Science, University of Calgary) for the NSERC Nectar Annual General Meeting, held after the ACM CSCW Conference in November, 2006, Banff.Item Metadata only DiscoTech: A Plug-In Toolkit to Improve Handling of Disconnection and Reconnection in Real-Time Groupware(ACM, 2012) Roy, B.; Graham, T.; Gutwin, C.Disconnection and reconnection are common problems for users of synchronous groupware, but these problems are not easy for developers to handle because of the wide range of scenarios and timeframes that must be considered. We have developed a new toolkit called DiscoTech that helps programmers deal with disconnection. The toolkit is based on five design dimensions that determine how stored information can be manipulated as the system waits for an absent user to rejoin, and how information should be replayed upon reconnection. DiscoTech provides a plug-in architecture to handle a wide variety of behaviours that developers may need during disconnection; these plug-ins range from fully generic tools to customized strategies with full knowledge of the groupware application. We present the design of the DiscoTech toolkit, show examples of its use, and provide evidence that it covers a broad range of situations, imposes minimal performance overhead, and is easy for programmers to learn. DiscoTech handles a wider range of issues than previous toolkits, without requiring undue effort, and provides a practical way to improve the real-world usability of synchronous groupware.Item Metadata only Evaluating the Effectiveness of Height Visualizations for Improving Gestural Communication at Distributed Tables(ACM, 2012) Genest, A. M.; Gutwin, C.In co-located collaboration, people use the space above the table for deictic gestures, and height is an important part of these gestures. However, when collaborators work at distributed tables, we know little about how to convey information about gesture height. A few visualizations have been proposed, but these have not been evaluated in detail. To better understand how remote embodiments can show gesture height, we developed several visualizations and evaluated them in three studies. First, we show that touch visualizations significantly improve people's accuracy in identifying the type and target of a gesture. Second, we show that visualizations of height above the table help to convey gesture qualities such as confidence, emphasis, and specificity. Third, we show that people quickly make use of height visualizations in realistic collaborative tasks, and that height-enhanced embodiments are strongly preferred. Our work illustrates several designs for effective visualization of height, and provides the first comprehensive evidence of the value of height information as a way to improve gestural communication in distributed tabletop groupware.Item Open Access FROM AWARENESS TO TEAMROOMS, GROUPWEB AND TURBOTURTLE: EIGHT SNAPSHOTS OF RECENT WORK IN THE GROUPLAB PROJECT(1995-12-01) Greenberg, S.; Gutwin, C.; Cockburn, A.; Roseman, M.This report contains eight short papers that serve as snapshots of recent work by members and collaborators of the GroupLab team. All papers are concerned with groupware, and all but one of the systems described were implemented using GroupKit, our groupware toolkit. The first five papers are a suite of articles that considers how awareness of others can be supported in groupware systems. The papers cover theoretical considerations of awareness (#2), practical efforts in building systems and widgets to support awareness (#1,3,4) and evaluation of widgets to determine their effectiveness and usability (#5). Suite Overview: Supporting Awareness of Others in Groupware 1. Peepholes: Low Cost Awareness of One's community 2. Workspace Awareness for Groupware 3. Workspace Awareness Support With Radar Views 4. A Fisheye Text Editor for Relaxed-WYSIWIS Groupware 5. A Usability Study of Workspace Awareness Widgets The next three papers cover individual projects. TeamRooms (#6) is a groupware equivalent of a physical team room. Group members can stock the room with applications, and can enter the room at any time to continue their work individually or collectively. GroupWeb (#7) is a World Wide Web browser that is group-aware. People can share their views of pages in real time, can gesture around it with telepointers, and can add group annotations to a page with a groupware editor. TurboTurtle (#8) is a microworld for Newtonian physics designed for children. Children were observed using TurboTurtle, and their collaboration styles are analyzed. 6. TeamRooms: Groupware for Shared Electronic Spaces 7. GroupWeb: A WWW Browser as Real Time Groupware 8. Children's Collaboration Styles in a Newtonian MicroWorldItem Metadata only Improving Digital Handoff Using the Space Above the Table(ACM, 2013) Sutcliffe, S. W. T.; Ivkovic, Z.; Flatla, D. R.; Pavlovych, A.; Stavness, I.; Gutwin, C.Object handoff - that is, passing an object or tool to another person - is an extremely common activity in collaborative tabletop work. On digital tables, object handoff is typically accomplished by sliding them on the table surface - but surface-only interactions can be slow and error-prone, particularly when there are multiple people carrying out multiple handoffs. An alternative approach is to use the space above the table for object handoff; this provides more room to move, but requires above-surface tracking. We have developed two above-the-surface handoff techniques that use simple and inexpensive tracking: a force-field technique that uses a depth camera to determine hand proximity, and an electromagnetic-field technique called ElectroTouch that provides positive indication when people touch hands over the table. We compared the new techniques to three kinds of surface-only handoff (sliding, flicking, and surface-only Force-Fields). The study showed that the above-surface techniques significantly improved both speed and accuracy, and that ElectroTouch was the best technique overall. This work provides designers with practical new techniques for substantially increasing performance and interaction richness on digital tables.Item Metadata only KinectArms: a Toolkit for Capturing and Displaying Arm Embodiments in Distributed Tabletop Groupware.(ACM, 2013) Genest, A. M.; Gutwin, C.; Tang, A.; Kalyn, M.; Ivkovic, Z.Gestures are a ubiquitous part of human communication over tables, but when tables are distributed, gestures become difficult to capture and represent. There are several problems: extracting arm images from video, representing the height of the gesture, and making the arm embodiment visible and understandable at the remote table. Current solutions to these problems are often expensive, complex to use, and difficult to set up. We have developed a new toolkit - KinectArms - that quickly and easily captures and displays arm embodiments. KinectArms uses a depth camera to segment the video and determine gesture height, and provides several visual effects for representing arms, showing gesture height, and enhancing visibility. KinectArms lets designers add rich arm embodiments to their systems without undue cost or development effort, greatly improving the expressiveness and usability of distributed tabletop groupware.Item Metadata only On API usability: An analysis and an evaluation tool(2010) Doucette, A.; Gutwin, C.Item Open Access SEMANTIC TELEPOINTERS FOR GROUPWARE(1996-06-01) Gutwin, C.; Roseman, M.; Greenberg, S.Real time groupware systems often display telepointers (multiple cursors) of all participants in the shared visual workspace. Through the simple mechanism of telepointers, participants can communicate their location, movement, and probable focus of attention within the document, and can gesture over the shared view. Yet telepointers can be improved. First, they can be applied to groupware where people's view of the work surface differs-through viewport, object placement, or representation variation-by mapping telepointers to the underlying objects rather than to Cartesian coordinates. Second, telepointers can be overloaded with semantic information to provide participants a stronger sense of awareness of what is going on, with little consumption of screen real estate.Item Open Access SHARING FISHEYE VIEWS IN RELAXED-WYSIWIS GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS(1995-11-01) Gutwin, C.; Greenberg, S.Desktop conferencing systems are now moving away from strict view-sharing and towards relaxed "what-you-see-is-what-I-see" (relaxed-WYSIWIS) interfaces, where distributed participants in a real time session can view different parts of a shared visual workspace. As with strict view-sharing, people using relaxed-WYSIWIS require a sense of workspace awareness -the up-to-the-minute knowledge about another person's interactions with the shared workspace. The problem is deciding how to provide a user with an appropriate level of awareness of what other participants are doing when they are working in different areas of the workspace. In this paper, we summarize requirements for workspace awareness, identify problems with existing groupware solutions, and propose as a replacement fisheye views that show both global context and local detail within a single window. Within groupware, these displays provide peripheral awareness of other participants by showing their position and actions in the global context. As well, detailed awareness is provided by assigning multiple focal points to each participant, and by magnifying the area around everyone's work to highlight all details of their interactions. Concepts are illustrated in two groupware prototypes: a fisheye graph browser, and a fisheye viewer for text documents.Item Metadata only Target Assistance for Subtly Balancing Competitive Play(ACM, 2011) Bateman, S.; Mandryk, R. L.; Stach, T.; Gutwin, C.In games where skills such as targeting are critical to winning, it is difficult for players with different skill levels to have a competitive and engaging experience. Although several mechanisms for accommodating different skill levels have been proposed, traditional approaches can be too obvious and can change the nature of the game. For games involving aiming, we propose the use of target assistance techniques (such as area cursors, target gravity, and sticky targets) to accommodate skill imbalances. We compared three techniques in a study, and found that area cursors and target gravity significantly reduced score differential in a shooting-gallery game. Further, less skilled players reported having more fun when the techniques helped them be more competitive, and even after they learned assistance was given, felt that this form of balancing was good for group gameplay. Our results show that target assistance techniques can make target-based games more competitive for shared play.Item Metadata only Understanding performance in touch selections: Tap, drag and radial pointing drag with finger, stylus and mouse(Elsevier, 2012) Cockburn, A.; Ahlstrom, D.; Gutwin, C.Touch-based interaction with computing devices is becoming more and more common. In order to design for this setting, it is critical to understand the basic human factors of touch interactions such as tapping and dragging; however, there is relatively little empirical research in this area, particularly for touch-based dragging. To provide foundational knowledge in this area, and to help designers understand the human factors of touch-based interactions, we conducted an experiment using three input devices (the finger, a stylus, and a mouse as a performance baseline) and three different pointing activities. The pointing activities were bidirectional tapping, one-dimensional dragging, and radial dragging (pointing to items arranged in a circle around the cursor). Tapping activities represent the elemental target selection method and are analysed as a performance baseline. Dragging is also a basic interaction method and understanding its performance is important for touch-based interfaces because it involves relatively high contact friction. Radial dragging is also important for touch-based systems as this technique is claimed to be well suited to direct input yet radial selections normally involve the relatively unstudied dragging action, and there have been few studies of the interaction mechanics of radial dragging. Performance models of tap, drag, and radial dragging are analysed. For tapping tasks, we confirm prior results showing finger pointing to be faster than the stylus/mouse but inaccurate, particularly with small targets. In dragging tasks, we also confirm that finger input is slower than the mouse and stylus, probably due to the relatively high surface friction. Dragging errors were low in all conditions. As expected, performance conformed to Fitts' Law. Our results for radial dragging are new, showing that errors, task time and movement distance are all linearly correlated with number of items available. We demonstrate that this performance is modelled by the Steering Law (where the tunnel width increases with movement distance) rather than Fitts' Law. Other radial dragging results showed that the stylus is fastest, followed by the mouse and finger, but that the stylus has the highest error rate of the three devices. Finger selections in the North-West direction were particularly slow and error prone, possibly due to a tendency for the finger to stick–slip when dragging in that direction.Item Open Access A USABILITY STUDY OF AWARENESS WIDGETS IN A SHARED WORKSPACE GROUPWARE SYSTEM(1996-03-01) Gutwin, C.; Roseman, M.; Greenberg, S.Workspace awareness is knowledge about others' interaction with a shared workspace. Groupware systems provide only limited information about other participants, often compromising workspace awareness. This paper describes a usability study of several widgets designed to help maintain awareness in a groupware workspace. These widgets include a miniature view, a radar view, a multiuser scrollbar, and a "what you see is what I do" view. The study examined the widgets' information content, how easily people could interpret them, and whether they were useful or distracting. Experimenter observations, subject questionnaires, and interviews indicate that the miniature and radar displays are useful and valuable for tasks involving spatial manipulation of artifacts.Item Open Access USING DISTORTION-ORIENTED DISPLAYS TO SUPPORT WORKSPACE AWARENESS(1996-01-01) Greenberg, S.; Cockburn, A.; Gutwin, C.Desktop conferencing systems are now moving away from strict view-sharing and towards relaxed "what-you-see-is-what-I-see" (relaxed-WYSIWIS) interfaces, where distributed participants in a real time session can view different parts of a shared visual workspace. As with strict view-sharing, people using relaxed-WYSIWIS require a sense of \fIworkspace awareness\fR-the up-to-the-minute knowledge about another person's interactions with the shared workspace. The problem is deciding how to provide a user with an appropriate level of awareness of what other participants are doing when they are working in different areas of the workspace. In this paper, we propose \fIdistortion oriented displays\fR as a novel way of providing this awareness. These displays, which employ magnification lenses and fisheye view techniques, show global context and local detail within a single window, providing both peripheral and detailed awareness of other participants' actions. Three prototype inventions are presented as examples of groupware distortion-oriented displays: the fisheye text viewer, the offset lens, and the Ihead-up lens.Item Open Access WORKSPACE AWARENESS IN REAL-TIME DISTRIBUTED GROUPWARE(1995-09-01) Gutwin, C.; Greenberg, S.The rich person-to-person interaction afforded by shared physical workspaces allows people to maintain up-to-the minute knowledge and about others' interaction with the workspace. This knowledge is workspace awareness, part of the glue that allows groups to collaborate effectively. In real-time groupware systems that provide a shared virtual workspace, the possibilities for interaction are impoverished when compared with physical workspaces, partly because support for workspace awareness has not generally been a priority in groupware design. In this paper, we present the concept of workspace awareness as one key to supporting the richness evident in face-to-face interaction. We construct a conceptual framework that describes the elements and mechanisms of workspace awareness, and then show several widgets that can be embedded in relaxed-WYSIWIS groupware systems to support the maintenance of workspace awareness.