This paper presents a system for interacting with digital information, called Triangles. The Triangles system is a physical/digital construction kit, which allows users to use two hands to grasp and manipulate complex digital information. The kit consists of a set of identical flat, plastic triangles, each with a microprocessor inside and magnetic edge connectors. The connectors enable the Triangles to be physically connected to each other and provide tactile feedback of these connections. The connectors also pass electricity, allowing the Triangles to desktop computer. When the pieces contact one another, specific connection information is sent back to a computer that keeps track of the configuration of the system. Specific two and three-dimensional configurations of the pieces can trigger application events.

“We’re searching here, trying to get away from the cut and dried handling of things all the way through—everything—and the only way to do it is to leave things open until we have completely explored every bit of it.” –Walt Disney Researchers in nonphotorealistic rendering (NPR) have investigated a variety of techniques to simulate the styles of artists. Recent work has resulted in methods for pen-and-ink illustration, pencil sketching, watercolor, engraving, and silhouette edge rendering. This paper presents real-time methods to emulate cartoon styles. We also present variations on a texture mapping technique to achieve real-time pencil sketching. We demonstrate our method of inking silhouettes, material and mesh boundaries, and crease edges. In addition, we present techniques for emphasizing motion of cartoon objects by introducing geometry into the cartoon scene. The rendering system is integrated with an animation system and a runtime multiresolution mesh (MRM) system to achieve scalability, ensuring real-time performance on any platform. Such solutions allow us to take advantage of evolving hardware in order to make nonphotorealistic animation and rendering achievable on low- and high-end consumer platforms. All of the techniques described can be applied to models created with standard modeling tools and require no additional mark-up information from the modeler.

Comics have a rich visual vocabulary, and people find them appealing. They are also an effective form of communication. We have built a system, called Comic Chat, that represents on-line communications in the form of comics. Comic Chat automates numerous aspects of comics generation, including balloon construction and layout, the placement and orientation of comic characters, the default selection of character gestures and expressions, the incorporation of semantic panel elements, and the choice of zoom factor for the virtual camera. This paper describes the mechanisms that Comic Chat uses to perform this automation, as well as novel aspects of the program’s user interface. Comic Chat is a working program, allowing groups of people to communicate over the Internet. It has several advantages over other graphical chat programs, including the availability of a graphical history, and a dynamic graphical presentation.

Gestural communication is an important part of shared work, both in face-to-face settings and distributed environments. However, gestures in groupware are often difficult to see and interpret because of disruptions to their motion caused by network jitter. One way to improve the visibility of remote gestures is by using traces--- visualizations of the last few moments' of a remote pointer's motion. We carried out an experiment to test the effectiveness of traces in helping people interpret gestures. We found that telepointer traces dramatically improved people's accuracy and confidence in their decisions as jitter delays grew larger. Our results suggest that telepointer traces and other visualizations of interaction history can be used to enrich communication among remote collaborators.

Telemurals is an abstract audio-video installation that seeks to initiate and sustain interaction between and within two remote spaces. Our goal is to improve the social aspects of casual mediated communications by incorporating events into the design of the communication medium that encourage people to engage in interaction when they otherwise would not. We call these events social catalysts, for they encourage people to initiate and sustain interaction. In this paper we discuss the design process and goals of our first Telemurals link between two public spaces, the building of Telemurals, and an ethnographic study describing how the system affected interaction between and within these two spaces based on the theories discussed in this paper.

We present a novel method for generating performance-driven, "hand-drawn" animation in real-time. Given an annotated set of hand-drawn faces for various expressions, our algorithm performs multi-way morphs to generate real-time animation that mimics the expressions of a user. Our system consists of a vision-based tracking component and a rendering component. Together, they form an animation system that can be used in a variety of applications, including teleconferencing, multi-user virtual worlds, compressed instructional videos, and consumer-oriented animation kits. This paper describes our algorithms in detail and illustrates the potential for this work in a teleconferencing application. Experience with our implementation suggests that there are several advantages to our hand-drawn characters over other alternatives: (1) flexibility of animation style; (2) increased compression of expression information; and (3) masking of errors made by the face tracking system that are distracting...

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Virtual embodiments of people in groupware systems provide a wealth of information to others in the group. They allow for explicit gestural communication, and they provide implicit awareness information about people’s locations and activities. However, the constraints of current networked groupware limit the effectiveness of these kinds of communication. This paper investigates how embodiments can be augmented with traces – visualizations of past movements – to help others perceive and interpret bodily communication more clearly and more accurately. The paper presents a case study of traces applied to telepointers, and gives several examples of how the concept can be used to improve interaction effectiveness in groupware. Key words: Real-time groupware, groupware usability, awareness, interaction histories, edit wear, traces. 1

Traditionally, time-varying data has been visualized using snapshots of the individual time steps or an animation of the snapshots shown in a sequential manner. For larger datasets with many timevarying features, animation can be limited in its use, as an observer can only track a limited number of features over the last few frames. Visually inspecting each snapshot is not practical either for a large number of time-steps. We propose new techniques inspired from the illustration literature to convey change over time more effectively in a time-varying dataset. Speedlines are used extensively by cartoonists to convey motion, speed, or change over different panels. Flow ribbons are another technique used by cartoonists to depict motion in a single frame. Strobe silhouettes are used to depict previous positions of an object to convey the previous positions of the object to the user. These illustration-inspired techniques can be used in conjunction with animation to convey change over time. Keywords: Flow visualization, Non-photorealistic rendering, time-varying data, illustration

A key to improving at any task is frequent feedback from people whose opinions we care about: our family, friends, mentors, and the experts. However, such input is not usually available from the right people at the time it is needed most, and attaining a deep understanding of someone else’s perspective requires immense effort. This paper introduces a technological solution. We present a novel method for automatically modeling a person’s attitudes and opinions, and a proactive interface called “What Would They Think? ” which offers the just-in-time perspectives of people whose opinions we care about, based on whatever the user happens to be reading or writing. In the application, each person is represented by a “digital persona, ” generated from an automated analysis of personal texts (e.g. weblogs and papers written by the person being modeled) using natural language processing and commonsense-based textual-affect sensing. In user studies, participants using our application were able to grasp the personalities and opinions of a panel of strangers more quickly and deeply than with either of two baseline methods. We discuss the theoretical and pragmatic implications of this research to intelligent user interfaces. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [User Interfaces]: interaction styles, natural language; I.2.7 [Natural Language Processing]: text analysis.