December’s issue of Esquire features augmented reality not only on its cover but a couple of places inside. This is not the first instance of AR on print media, of course, but it’s nicely done. I’d love to see this sort of thing make its way into scientific publishing eventually, for 3d and animated illustrations and data visualization. Right now authors can put digital content related to their work out on the web, but it’s an altogether different subjective experience when it’s integrated into the printed object (book, journal, etc.).

Here’s a video tour of the AR in the Esquire issue:

And comments from mashable:

“Print might be in trouble, but Esquire magazine won’t be going gently into that good night. The December issue of the magazine will feature augmented reality pages that will come alive when displayed in front of a webcam.

Augmented reality is a trend and phenomenon we’re starting to see more and more uses of across the web. In March, GE played with augmented reality while showing off its Smart Grid technology. Earlier this month, musician John Mayer released an augmented reality enhanced music video. The Disney.com iPhone app that was released earlier this week also utilizes some AR features.”

Some time this summer Twitter announced its RT (retweet) API, a structured way of expressing the forwarding (often with comments) of others tweets that has, until now, been expressed informally by prepending the letters RT to another person’s tweet. The practice of retweeting (described in a forth-coming paper by danah boyd, Scott Golder, and Gilad Lotan) has evolved several conventions for crediting the source and incorporating comments. In addition to forwarding and commenting on the message, it can also serve as a useful mechanism to introduce people to others worth following.

The new API formalizes this notion, but also subverts established practice.

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Merrie Morris, Jeremy Pickens and I are organizing a second workshop on collaborative information seeking to be held in conjunction with CSCW2010 on Feb 7, 2010. More details on an earlier post about the workshop, and on the workshop site itself. Look over the position papers from the first workshop (some of which will be published in an IP&M Special Issue soon), and submit one yourself!

Looking forward to lots of good discussion!

We’re happy to note that the book “Designing User Friendly Augmented Work Environments” (edited by Saadi Lahlou) has been published by Springer, in hardcover with an online version available. We have a chapter in it on our USE smart conference room system: “Designing an Easy-to-Use Executive Conference Room Control System.” The chapter starts with some of the field work we did to understand the work flows of the stakeholders, and then describes the evolution of the system we built to support the executive, his assistant, and others who used the meeting room. The system developed during this project was the precursor to the DICE system.

The process of writing and publishing this chapter took a considerable amount of time, and thus it is interesting to look back on some of our early designs to see how they have evolved. One aspect that changed was the name of project: we started out calling the system USE (Usable Smart Environment) and that terminology is used in the book chapter. By the time we completed this project and moved onto the larger conference room, we changed the name to DICE (Distributed Intelligent Conferencing Environment). DICE now runs in both rooms, and USE is the name of Gene’s group, just to add to the confusion.

For more information on this work, check out the video, some before/after pictures, and the CHI 2009 paper. We’re also working on a journal article that extends the CHI findings. Look for it in a few years!

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is increasingly being used to obtain judgments of relevance that can be used to establish gold standards with which to evaluate information seeking experiments. The attraction is clear: for a few bucks, in a few days, you can obtain data that is every bit as useful for evaluating simulations and other off-line experiments as data collected in the lab from “live” participants, and may be a good substitute for TREC assessors’ judgments. And of course the scale of the enterprise is such that you can run complex multi-factor experiments and still retain enough power. If you’re not up to doing this yourself, companies such as Dolores Labs will do it for you.

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ReBoard architecture (from a ReBoard image)

Over the last year or so, Scott Carter, Jacob Biehl, and I have built and deployed an interesting system for managing whiteboard content. The system, ReBoard, consists of a camera that takes pictures of a traditional (or electronic, if you wanted) whiteboard when whiteboard content changes. The images captured by the camera are cleaned up by adjusting contrast and correcting for skew, and then saved into a database along with a bunch of metadata that identifies the changed region, the time and place the image was taken, and whether the content was likely created as a collaboration. Once captured, images can be shared with others and can be annotated by adding tags and notes.

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A couple of weeks ago I attended the SIAM/ACM Joint Conference on Geometric and Physical Modeling and heard a lovely talk by Richard Riesenfeld. Riesenfeld and his wife Elaine Cohen were this year’s Bézier award winners for their work in computer aided geometric design (CAGD). He spoke about his correspondence with Bézier and showed us many of the letters they sent back and forth in the early days of CAD/CAM, with their many hand drawn diagrams and the typed text with the math symbols added in by hand. I spent the time marveling at how they managed to have an effective collaboration over such an impoverished communication channel. But even with all of the wonderful 3D rendering capabilities we have today, it is still hard to communicate about 3D objects and spaces over a distance. Having a visual rendering is not sufficient. Spatial reasoning requires more. Riesenfeld mentioned Bézier’s view that “touch is more discriminative than eyes.”

This theme reminded me that I’ve been meaning to describe and send to the math factory folks  a suggestion for an exhibit in the math museum. Instead, I’ll first write about it here.

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A while ago, Google introduced Google Squared, an attempt to help people keep track of different aspects in their search results. I think that it’s an interesting HCIR idea that still lacks a good implementation, as I’ve written here and here. Recently, Google introduced a means of adding results informed by the searcher’s social network, which Google has dubbed “Social Circle.” I spent some time playing with it, and found it lacking.

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I just attended ACM Multimedia 2009 in Beijing to present a paper on image annotation in the workshop on Large Scale Multimedia Retrieval and Mining. The multimedia research community is grappling with a dramatic increase in the scale of its information management problems in an era of rapid growth in user-generated content and negligible distribution costs (i.e. YouTube and flickr).  The workshop itself devoted attention to both retrieval and mining, while the content track of the main conference seemed to be dominated by search applications.

When the observation is made that tagged multimedia data is now freely and abundantly available, it’s usually to motivate papers on media search rather than annotation.  This is in part due to the challenges of adapting established model-based annotation methods to large media collections and large tag sets.  Alternatively, search-based annotation achieves scalability at the expense of accuracy, at least in comparison to model-based approaches.    Our workshop paper looked to combine the efficiency of search-based approaches with the accuracy afforded by model-based classification. Continue Reading

Last week I was in DC at the HCIR 2009 workshop organized by Bill Kules, Daniel Tunkelang, and Ryen White. This was the third workshop in the series, and by far the biggest and most diverse in terms of attendees. Proceedings are available online. Daniel and Max Wilson have already given pretty good coverage to what happened at the workshop, so I will focus on my impressions, starting with Ben Shneiderman‘s keynote.

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