Spatially Augmented Reality (SAR) Toolkit
Figure: A grid pattern projected on a white box.
Projection devices are not simply limited to a two dimensional screen, but can be used to dynamically texture arbitrary 3D surfaces. Although the research community has demonstrated many novel techniques in projector calibration and image projection, there has been little work that explores the bottlenecks that occur when this technology is utilized by its end users, particularly for new media and performance artists. Many theatre performance and new media installation pieces often harness the use of projection technology to change the perception of their environment; however, this is still mainly limited to a basic 2D projection surface. This ongoing work identifies the bottlenecks faced by artists using projection technology and introduces the SAR toolkit, a framework that helps improve the workflow for content generation and the overall user interaction of SAR applications.
(Coming Soon)
SART Videos
Augmented Engineering
Working with Brett Jones
UbiFriends
UbiFriends is a scalable mobile social networking application that leverages aggregate location data to infer social ties between users. UbiFriends approximates social distance by leveraging the fact that users who spend time together or frequent the same locations are more likely to be friends. Traditional social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace utilize friendship suggestion tools to recommend existing and potential social ties between users. Friendships are suggested based upon correlations between the user's profiles, similarities in position within the network and a number of other factors. While physical proximity is not a replacement for more complex social distance calculations, UbiFriends demonstrates that location data can be used as a major component in successful network analysis.
(Coming Soon)
Groupware in Creativity
Creativity as modeled using the recluse genius paradigm fails to recognize the necessity and value of the collaborative aspects involved. Enhancing the creative output of teams will become more and more necessary as the complexity of problems increases; this is especially true within the design domain. This work explores the group processes and accompanying bottlenecks related to design work. Individuals and teams with experience in collocated design settings were studied to extract principles and best practices for group design work. Based on the findings, a set of design implications were extracted and IdeaSpaces, an early prototype of a collaborative system was built to implement those conclusions. The tool attempts to model the highly effective ways that design teams work in a collocated environment while also addressing some of the bottlenecks they face.
GroupwareCreativity.pdf
ClubDev
A new interaction framework for collaborating in multiple display environments (MDEs). The framework allows users to share task information across displays via off-the-shelf applications, to perform near simultaneous input between applications for focused problem solving, mediate which applications are shared and when, and to place information on shared displays for discussion and reflection. This project was done in collaboration with Jacob Biehl, William Baker, and Brian Bailey.
ClubDev.pdf