Browsing by Author "Lapides, Paul"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    The 3D Tractus: A Three-Dimensional Drawing Board
    (2005-08-26) Lapides, Paul; Sharlin, Ehud; Costa Sousa, Mario; Streit, Lisa
    We present the 3D Tractus: a simple and inexpensive system for interaction and exploration of three-dimensional (3D) data. The device is based on a traditional drawing board-like mechanical structure that can be easily moved up and down while its surface height is being tracked using a simple sensor. Users interact with a tablet or tablet PC that rests on the surface while simultaneously changing its height. The result is direct mapping of virtual and physical spaces allowing intuitive 3D interaction and data exploration. The 3D Tractus allows us to investigate novel 3D interaction techniques based on sketching and drawing as well as intuitive visual indicators and GUI layouts. The 3D Tractus' simple design concept can be easily adapted to other tabletop systems and the simple nature of the physical interaction allows the design of various exciting applications. We detail here the design and development of the 3D Tractus hardware and software as well as preliminary evaluation of a 3D drawing and sketching application realized using the new tabletop interface.
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    "Designing Video Games with Social, Physical, and Authorship Gameplay
    (2012-02-15T18:13:31Z) Lapides, Paul; Sharlin, Ehud; Costa Sousa, Mario
    "Today's video games have undergone many changes that have turned them from niche hobbies into ubiquitous and popular activities. Modern games now utilize physical interaction as the primary modality for controlling the game, they have become more casual and social activities, and they have enabled players to express their creativity through the authorship of content. In this thesis, we investigate the use of physical interaction, socialization, and authorship of content in the design of video games. We have created a design framework that can be used as a guide for designing new games and have designed three games to investigate the successes and limitations of each of the three themes: Film Karaoke, Joke's On You, and Social Comics. Through our evaluation of Social Comics, we have come to conclude that physicality, sociability, and authorship are powerful design themes for enhancing the player's experience and for creating new forms of gameplay."
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    Designing video games with social, physical, and authorship gameplay
    (2012) Lapides, Paul; Sharlin, Ehud; Costa Sousa, Mário
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    Information Visualization for Exploration and Self-Reflection in Social Media
    (2021-06) Lapides, Paul; Carpendale, Sheelagh; Isenberg, Petra; Willett, Wesley; Boulanger, Pierre; Katz, Larry; Aycock, John
    The emergence of global social media platforms in the last decade has changed how people communicate and inform themselves. Today, people use social media during work and leisure time to send messages, browse current events, and keep up with friends and family both near and far. Virtually every platform uses reverse chronological lists to prioritize and deliver content throughout the network. This presentation modality implicitly puts the viewer's focus on the present moment, on the newest content available. Lists may be effective for the purposes of real-time content viewing but other representations are better suited to see our social media activity in aggregate and to focus the viewer's attention on the past. This dissertation investigates the potential of information visualization to show people their social media data to gain awareness about their online social history. Unlike many visualizations for social media that use graph representations and focus on the structure of the network, our approach focuses on showing the broad temporal characteristics of personal social media activity. We present design studies that focus on three different parts of a social media platform, specifically Facebook: the news feed, the personal profile, and private messages. In our first study, participants were observed while they browsed their news feed and were interviewed in situ about their reactions and opinions. Next, we present Friend Bubbles, an interactive visualization that shows the connections between friends and posted content on the personal profile. Finally, we present TextVis, an online survey tool that asks participants to explore their instant message history with a large-scale temporal visualization. This dissertation ends with reflections about how social media and computer interfaces may influence people's attention and awareness, and how information visualization can be used to support exploration and deeper knowledge about personal social media experiences.
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    Modeling Plant Variations through 3D Interactive Sketches
    (2005-12-06) Streit, Lisa; Lapides, Paul; Costa Sousa, Mario; Sharlin, Ehud
    Modeling of realistic looking plants is still a complex problem requiring specification of the plant structure, geometry and surface characteristics. Modeling a collection of plants is more problematic especially since each plant is slightly different. Altering the shape of branches and stems is one of the most dramatic and natural methods of creating differing instances of the same plant type. In this paper, we present a sketch-based interface for modeling plant variations through specification of branch and stem shape. Our system is based on interaction with the 3D Tractus: a new physical interface we developed to support direct 3D sketching. The 3D strokes from the 3D Tractus are used as input to a biologically-based modeling method that mimics natural growth variation factors of real plants.
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    News Feed: What's in it for Me?
    (ACM, 2015) Lapides, Paul; Chokshi, Apoorve; Carpendale, Sheelagh; Greenberg, Saul
    Over a billion people use social networking sites like Facebook to maintain awareness of their friends. Facebook's News Feed is the primary mechanism by which people are shown updates about their friends' daily activities on the site in the form of an algorithmically curated list of stories. This paper examines how people browse the News Feed, their perceptions and satisfaction while using it, and the interactions they make with their personal social network. We conducted a qualitative study involving think-aloud semi-structured interviews as the participants casually browsed their own feeds. We observed a wide variation in the use of the News Feed ranging from careful consideration of social conventions, judgment of people, and annoyance and frustration towards certain friends. Our findings suggest that people do not deliberately curate their own News Feed either due to lack of awareness or perceived social repercussions.
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    Seamless Mixed Reality Tracking in Tabletop Reservoir Engineering Interaction
    (2012-04-20T17:00:10Z) Lapides, Paul; Sultanum, Nicole; Sharlin, Ehud; Costa Sousa, Mario
    In this paper we present a novel mixed reality tracking system for collaborative tabletop applications that uses decorative markers and embedded application markers to create a continuous and seamless tracking space for mobile devices. Users can view and interact with mixed reality datasets on their mobile device, such as a tablet or smartphone, from distances both far and very near to the tabletop. We implement the tracking system in the context of a collaborative reservoir engineering tool that brings together many experts who need a private workspace to interact with unique datasets, which is supported by our system.
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    Snakey: A Tangible User Interface for Well Path Planning in the Context of Reservoir Engineering
    (2011-05-26T21:35:45Z) Harris, John; Young, James; Sultanum, Nicole; Lapides, Paul; Sharlin, Ehud; Costa Sousa, Mario
    We present Snakey, a tangible user interface (TUI) designed for the field of reservoir engineering. The Snakey interface focuses on intuitive manipulation and interaction with 3D curves common to underground well path planning. Our paper discusses design goals and prototyping solutions relating to the physical materials, sensing technology, input/output mapping, and multi-modal information feedback of the Snakey TUI. The paper also discusses a design critique of the latest prototype interface performed by domain experts (experienced reservoir engineers) and concludes by outlining our findings regarding the next steps required to improve the current Snakey interface prototype.
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    Three Dimensional Tangible User Interface for Controlling a Robotic Team
    (2007-09-18) Lapides, Paul; Sharlin, Ehud; Costa Sousa, Mario
    We describe a new method for controlling a group of robots in three-dimensional (3D) space using a tangible user interface called the 3D Tractus. Our interface maps the task space into an interactive 3D space, allowing a single user to intuitively monitor and control a group of robots. We present the use of the interface in controlling a group of virtual software bots and a physical Sony AIBO robot dog in an urban search and rescue environment involving a bomb hidden inside of a building. We also describe a comparative user study we performed where participants were asked to use both the 3D physical interface and a traditional 2D graphical user interface in order to try and demonstrate the benefits and drawbacks of each approach for HRI tasks.