RICELab Rethinking Interaction Collaboration and Engagement

Digital workrooms are places where teams will work and make decisions from in the future. We envision such rooms as being comprised of multiple large-scale interactive surfaces as well as personal devices such as mobile devices, tablets, and laptops. Our interest is to designing interaction techniques and applications for such environments that allow people to work effectively and fluidly with one another. Our intention is to build powerful tools that augment how teams think and operate. Our work in this space is long-running and multi-faceted.

Foundational Studies of Collaborative Work. We have conducted several foundational studies of the ways in which people work and operate with traditional surfaces (e.g. tabletops and whiteboards) in order to extract and understand design requirements for digital counterparts [Tang, A., Lanir, J., Greenberg, S., and Fels, S. (2009). Supporting transitions in work: informing large display application design by understanding whiteboard use. In GROUP '09: Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international conference on Supporting group work, 149--158.] [Tang, A., and Fels, S. (2008). Four Lessons from Traditional MDEs. In Beyond the Laboratory: Supporting Authentic Collaboration with Multiple Displays - Workshop at CSCW 2008.] [Tang, A., Parker, J., Lanir, J., Booth, K., and Fels, S. (2006). Studying collaborative surface use to guide large display interaction design. In Conference Companion of the 2006 20th Anniversary Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 219--220.] .

Interaction Techniques. We have also designed many different kinds of interaction techniques, including the now famous Rotate-N-Translate technique, which is a standard interaction technique on most touch surfaces [Kruger, R., Carpendale, S., Scott, S., and Tang, A. (2005). Fluid integration of rotation and translation. In CHI '05: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 601--610.] , as well as full-body shadow-based interaction techniques [Shoemaker, G., Tang, A., and Booth, K. (2007). Shadow reaching: a new perspective on interaction for large displays. In UIST '07: Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, 53--56.] , and we have explored designing gesture-based techniques for interaction in MSEs [Seyed, T., Burns, C., Costa Sousa, M., Maurer, F., and Tang, A. (2012). Eliciting usable gestures for multi-display environments. In ITS '12: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM international conference on Interactive tabletops and surfaces, 41--50.] .

Applications. To ground our explorations, we have also designed several concrete applications. These applications range in terms of domain, and application scenario. For instance, [Finke, M., Tang, A., Leung, R., and Blackstock, M. (2008). Lessons learned: game design for large public displays. In DIMEA '08: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts, 26--33.] [tang2008bystanderworkshop] [Tang, A., Finke, M., Blackstock, M., Leung, R., Deutscher, M., and Lea, R. (2008). Designing for bystanders: reflections on building a public digital forum. In CHI '08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 879--882.] explore the design and use of publicly accessible displays in public settings, where we designed mobile phone-based interaction techniques for interacting with the public display. We have also studied specific application scenarios, including medical data exploration [Seyed, T., Rodrigues, F., Maurer, F., and Tang, A. (2014). Medical Imaging Specialists and 3D: A Domain Perspective on Mobile 3D Interactions. In CHI EA '14: CHI '14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2341--2346.] [Seyed, T., Rodrigues, F., Maurer, F., and Tang, A. (2014). Exploring 3D volumetric medical data using mobile devices. In 3DUI 2014: 2014 IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces, 173--174.] , brainstorming scenarios with paper-based interaction [pertender2012ideaplayground] , teaching and learning scenarios where students use devices to interact with large projected displays [Lanir, J., Booth, K., and Tang, A. (2010). Enabling Student Control of a Classroom's Shared Screen. In EIST 2010: Next Generation of HCI and Education: Workshop on UI Technology and Education Pedagogy - Workshop at CHI 2010.] , awareness displays for colleagues [Chen, X., Boring, S., Carpendale, S., Tang, A., and Greenberg, S. (2012). Spalendar: visualizing a group's calendar events over a geographic space on a public display. In AVI '12: Proceedings of the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, 689--696.] , oil and gas exploration [Seyed, T., Costa Sousa, M., Maurer, F., and Tang, A. (2013). SkyHunter: a multi-surface environment for supporting oil and gas exploration. In ITS '13: Proceedings of the 2013 ACM international conference on Interactive tabletops and surfaces, 15--22.] , and decision making support for software engineering [Aseniero, B., Wun, T., Ledo, D., Ruhe, G., Tang, A., and Carpendale, S. (2015). STRATOS: Using Visualization to Support Decisions in Strategic Software Release Planning. In CHI 2015: Proceedings of the 2015 SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1479--1488.] [Aseniero, B. (2014). STRATOS: The Design of Visualization to Support Decision-making in Software Release Planning. In University of Calgary.] .

Tools for Understanding MSE Use. To support our studies of how people make use of these tools, we have designed several tools that allow us to visualize and understand how people are making use of the tools, which in turn allows us to design more effective tools for collaboration in MSEs [Marquardt, N., Schardong, F., and Tang, A. (2015). EXCITE: EXploring Collaborative Interaction in Tracked Environments. In INTERACT 2015: Proceedings of INTERACT 2015 - 16th IFIP TC 13 International Conference, 89--97.] [Tang, A., Pahud, M., Carpendale, S., and Buxton, B. (2010). VisTACO: visualizing tabletop collaboration. In ITS '10: ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces, 29--38.] .

Publications