Browsing by Author "Nacenta, Miguel A."

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    Application Programming Interface (API) for the Haptic Tabletop Puck
    (5th Annual Students’ Union Undergraduate Research Symposium, 2010) Ledo, David; Marquardt, Nicolai; Nacenta, Miguel A.; Greenberg, Saul
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    A comparison of ray pointing techniques for very large displays
    (Canadian Information Processing Society, 2010) Jota, Ricardo; Nacenta, Miguel A.; Jorge, Joaquim A.; Carpendale, Sheelagh; Greenberg, Saul
    Ray-pointing techniques are often advocated as a way for people to interact with very large displays from several meters away. We are interested in two factors that can affect ray pointing: the particular technique's control type, and parallax. Consequently, we tested four ray pointing variants on a wall display that covers a large part of the user's field of view. Tasks included horizontal and vertical targeting, and tracing. Our results show that (a) techniques based on 'rotational control' perform better for targeting tasks, and (b) techniques with low parallax are best for tracing tasks. We also show that a Fitts's law analysis based on angles (as opposed to linear distances) better approximates people's ray pointing performance.
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    The Haptic Tabletop Puck: Tactile Feedback for Interactive Tabletops
    (ACM, 2009) Marquardt, Nicolai; Nacenta, Miguel A.; Young, Jim; Carpendale, Sheelagh; Greenberg, Saul; Sharlin, Ehud
    In everyday life, our interactions with objects on real tables include how our fingertips feel those objects. In comparison, current digital interactive tables present a uniform touch surface that feels the same, regardless of what it presents visually. In this paper, we explore how tactile interaction can be used with digital tabletop surfaces. We present a simple and inexpensive device -- the Haptic Tabletop Puck -- that incorporates dynamic, interactive haptics into tabletop interaction. We created several applications that explore tactile feedback in the area of haptic information visualization, haptic graphical interfaces, and computer supported collaboration. In particular, we focus on how a person may interact with the friction, height, texture and malleability of digital objects.
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    The Haptic Tabletop Puck: Tactile Feedback for Interactive Tabletops
    (ACM, 2009) Marquardt, Nicolai; Nacenta, Miguel A.; Young, Jim; Carpendale, Sheelagh; Greenberg, Saul; Sharlin, Ehud
    In everyday life, our interactions with objects on real tables include how our fingertips feel those objects. In comparison, current digital interactive tables present a uniform touch surface that feels the same, regardless of what it presents visually. In this paper, we explore how tactile interaction can be used with digital tabletop surfaces. We present a simple and inexpensive device -- the Haptic Tabletop Puck -- that incorporates dynamic, interactive haptics into tabletop interaction. We created several applications that explore tactile feedback in the area of haptic information visualization, haptic graphical interfaces, and computer supported collaboration. In particular, we focus on how a person may interact with the friction, height, texture and malleability of digital objects.
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    The Haptic Tabletop Puck: The Video
    (ACM, 2009) Marquardt, Nicolai; Nacenta, Miguel A.; Young, Jim; Carpendale, Sheelagh; Greenberg, Saul; Sharlin, Ehud
    In everyday life, our interactions with objects on real tables include how our fingertips feel those objects. In comparison, current digital interactive tables present a uniform touch surface that feels the same, regardless of what it presents visually. In this video, we demonstrate how tactile interaction can be used with digital tabletop surfaces. We present a simple and inexpensive device -- the Haptic Tabletop Puck -- that incorporates dynamic, interactive haptics into tabletop interaction. We created several applications that explore tactile feedback in the area of haptic information visualization, haptic graphical interfaces, and computer supported collaboration. In particular, we focus on how a person may interact with the friction, height, texture and malleability of digital objects.
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    The HAPTIC TOUCH Toolkit: Enabling Exploration of Haptic Interactions
    (2011-09-26T15:10:23Z) Ledo, David; Nacenta, Miguel A.; Marquardt, Nicolai; Boring, Sebastian; Greenberg, Saul
    In the real world, touch based interaction relies on haptic feedback (e.g., grasping objects, feeling textures). Unfortunately, such feedback is absent in current tabletop systems. The previously developed Haptic Tabletop Puck (HTP) aims at supporting experimentation with and development of inexpensive tabletop haptic interfaces. The problem is that programming the HTP is difficult due to interactions when coding its multiple hardware components. To address this problem, we contribute the HAPTICTOUCH toolkit, which allows developers to rapidly prototype haptic tabletop applications. Our toolkit is structured in three layers that enable programmers to: (1) directly control the device, (2) create customized combinable haptic behaviors (e.g. softness, oscillation), and (3) use visuals (e.g., shapes, images, buttons) to quickly make use of the aforementioned behaviors. Our preliminary study found that programmers could use the HAPTICTOUCH toolkit to create haptic tabletop applications in a short amount of time.
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    The LunchTable: a multi-user, multi-display system for information sharing in casual group interactions
    (ACM, 2012) Nacenta, Miguel A.; Jakobsen, Mikkel R.; Dautriche, Remy; Hinrichs, Uta; Dork, Marian; Haber, Jonathan; Carpendale, Sheelagh
    People often use mobile devices to access information during conversations in casual settings, but mobile devices are not well suited for interaction in groups. Large situated displays promise to better support access to and sharing of information in casual conversations. This paper presents the LunchTable, a multi-user system based on semi-public displays that supports such casual group interactions around a lunch table. We describe our design goals and the resulting system, as well as a weeklong study of the interaction with the system in the lunch space of a research lab. Our results show substantial use of the LunchTable for sharing visual information such as online maps and videos that are otherwise difficult to share in conversations. Also, equal simultaneous access from several users does not seem critical in casual group interactions.
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    Transmogrification: casual manipulation of visualizations.
    (ACM, 2013) Brosz, John; Nacenta, Miguel A.; Pusch, Richard; Carpendale, Sheelagh; Hurter, Christophe
    A transmogrifier is a novel interface that enables quick, on-the-fly graphic transformations. A region of a graphic can be specified by a shape and transformed into a destination shape with real-time, visual feedback. Both origin and destination shapes can be circles, quadrilaterals or arbitrary shapes defined through touch. Transmogrifiers are flexible, fast and simple to create and invite use in casual InfoVis scenarios, opening the door to alternative ways of exploring and displaying existing visualizations (e.g., rectifying routes or rivers in maps), and enabling free-form prototyping of new visualizations (e.g., lenses).
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    Ubiquitous cursor: a comparison of direct and indirect pointing feedback in multi-display environments
    (Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society, 2011) Xiao, Robert; Nacenta, Miguel A.; Mandryk, Regan L.; Cockburn, Andy; Gutwin, Carl
    Multi-display environments (MDEs) connect several displays into a single digital workspace. One of the main problems to be solved in an MDE's design is how to enable movement of objects from one display to another. When the real-world space between displays is modeled as part of the workspace (i.e., Mouse Ether), it becomes difficult for users to keep track of their cursors during a transition between displays. To address this problem, we developed the Ubiquitous Cursor system, which uses a projector and a hemispherical mirror to completely cover the interior of a room with usable low-resolution pixels. Ubiquitous Cursor allows us to provide direct feedback about the location of the cursor between displays. To assess the effectiveness of this direct-feedback approach, we carried out a study that compared Ubiquitous Cursor with two other standard approaches: Halos, which provide indirect feedback about the cursor's location; and Stitching, which warps the cursor between displays, similar to the way that current operating systems address multiple monitors. Our study tested simple cross-display pointing tasks in an MDE; the results showed that Ubiquitous Cursor was significantly faster than both other approaches. Our work shows the feasibility and the value of providing direct feedback for cross-display movement, and adds to our understanding of the principles underlying targeting performance in MDEs.