The BooksOnline ’10 workshop will be held on October 26, 2010 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in conjunction with the CIKM 2010 conference. The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers with interests related to various aspects online reading, including digital collections, user experience, and design and technology. See the Call for Papers for a more detailed description of relevant topics. The workshop is organized by Gabriella Kazai (Microsoft Research, UK) and Peter Brusilovsky (University of Pittsburgh).

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Miles Efron and I have written about micro-IR in the past (see here, here, and here), and I recently came across another interesting example in the form of the Houzz App for the iPad. Houzz is an interface that fronts a collection of photographs of house interiors, the kind of stuff you might find in magazines and interior design/decoration books. It provides (an imperfect) browsing and search interface to find images by geographic area, by room function, etc.  It also has a mode which brings together sets of images on a theme, curated by a designer with a blog. Each set of images comes with an introduction by the blogger, a bit of background on the person,  commentary on each image, and even blog-like discussions among readers and designers associated with each theme.

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Yesterday I attended an evening presentation session of student projects created in several courses related to HCI at UC Berkeley. The show was organized by Bjoern Hartmann and Maneesh Agrawala, and featured presentations by teams from four courses from three different disciplines: CS, SIMS, and  Art/Anthropology. Each presentation took 2.5 minutes, and there were over 30 presentations total. Most of the work was around the design of mobile applications, and some creative constraints (e.g., don’t design for students; focus on specific populations) stipulated at the beginning of the projects ensured a great diversity of designs.

I cannot possibly do justice to the effort and to the results here, but fortunately all presentations and many associated videos are available online. Some presentations stood out, however, and deserve special mention.

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The capture of whiteboard images, while required for systems such as ReBoard, is not particularly interesting these days from a research perspective. What’s more interesting (and what’s interesting to us about ReBoard) is how this captured information can be used.

We’ve been using video cameras as network-accessible Axis digital still cameras for ReBoard, and they produce reasonable, but by no means great, images. They work pretty well in our offices, where they can be mounted on the opposite wall, and calibrated to image the whiteboard. We run the captured images through a process that corrects the distortion and extracts the whiteboard region, and then shove the images (both the original and the distorted one)  into a database. Works great.

But what happens when the whiteboard moves?

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Recently I tried an experiment with one of our iPads to read and review a journal submission using the iAnnotate application. For the purposes of review, I had to read and comment on the draft, and then write up the review. I approached the problem much like I would had I been reading on paper, which included highlighting important, controversial or confusing passages, writing comments and reactions in the margins, and flipping around the document. These were all activities we had supported in XLibris, and I was curious how the iPad would stack up.

The short of it is: loading documents: OK; readability: Great; inking: poor; highlighting: poor; text annotations: OK; within-document navigation: so-so; between-document navigation: OK. Overall: good for reading, not good for active reading.

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Are maps better than text for presenting information on mobile devices? That was the question explored by Karen Church, Joachim Neumann, Mauro Cherubini and Nuria Oliver in a paper (about to be) presented at the WWW 2010 conference, they present evidence that in some cases a textual display of information supports people’s information needs more effectively than a map-based one.

The two interfaces were evaluated over the course of a month of use “in the wild” (but in Ireland, not in in Spain). Each participant had access to both interfaces, and was shown how to use them to ask location-specific questions, which would be answered by others nearby. Availability of answers was communicated via SMS messages.

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The use of Twitter at conferences seems to be growing, and I think we are beginning to see some limitations of the current tool suite with respect to making use of tweets at a conference in real time. At CHI 2010 I was not able to participate much in live-tweeting because I did not want to carry my heavy Thinkpad T61 around all day, and my iPhone wasn’t up to the task. While the iPhone was adequate for checking e-mail and using the CHI 2010 schedule app, the battery would run down by the end of the day of intermittent use. Furthermore, the screen wasn’t large enough to take notes, type tweets in a timely manner, and to keep up with the stream of tweets from other attendees. In fact, in some cases it seemed that people who were following the conference remotely had a better grasp of the breadth of activity in the sessions than I did at the conference.
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Stacy Branham who was an intern with us last summer gave an excellent talk at CHI 2010 about the study that she ran of how people use ReBoard. I’ve written about the study before, and the papers are available here and here. But the slides are interesting in their own right, and tell a complementary story.

First, there are the CHI Madness slides:

Let the slides auto-advance for the best effect.

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Paper still plays an important role in many tasks even in this age of computers. This phenomenon can be attributed to paper’s unique advantages in display quality, spatial arrangement flexibility, instant accessibility and robustness, which the existing computers can hardly beat. However, paper lacks computational capability and does not render dynamic information. In contrast, cell phones are becoming powerful in computation and communication, providing a convenient access to dynamic information and digital services. Nevertheless, cell phones are constrained by their limited screen size, relatively lower display quality and cumbersome input methods. Combining the merits of paper and cell phones for rich GUI-like interactions on paper has become an active research area.

Here at FXPAL, the Paper UI group currently focuses on cell phone-based interfaces and their supporting techniques to link paper documents to digital information and enable rich digital interactions on physical paper through content-based image recognition algorithms. We started  research in this area several years ago (see our project page for more details), and our recent on-going projects include EMM and PACER.

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A lot of people (like me) will use the iPad as an e-reader, among other things. It’s a good opportunity to play around with what a e-book actually can be, since the iPad offers things that Kindle can’t (color, animation…). I vote for more like this, please:

It’s in the iTunes store here.