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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Reading images is a quite common task; radiologists looks at X-rays, airport screeners scan suitcases, and astronomers inspect images from telescopes. In many of these visual search tasks, the outcome is important. We don’t want the airport screens to miss a weapon, or the radiologist to miss any lesions. In a paper we presented at the recent Eye Tracking Research and Application Symposium (ETRA 2010), we looked into how information of where people have looked can be used to guide them to parts of images not yet examined.

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There are generally two types of tags for linking digital content and paper documents. Marker-based tags and RFIDs employ a modification of the printed document. Content-based solutions remove the physical tag entirely and link using features of the existing printed matter. Chunyuan, Laurent, Gene, Qiong, and I recently published a paper in IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine that explores the two tag types’ use and design trade-offs by comparing our experiences developing and evaluating two systems  that use marker-based tagging — DynamInk and PapierCraft — with two systems that utilize content-based tagging — Pacer and ReBoard. In the paper, we situate these four systems in the design space of interactive paper systems and discuss lessons we learned from creating and deploying each technology.

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Apple.com has a lovely article here on the iPhone app we built so our collaborators at TCHO could monitor and control their chocolate lab machines remotely. This work is part of our explorations in mixed reality for industrial enterprises, in particular the Virtual Factory project. Below you can see a few screenshots from the iPhone lab app (click for larger image).