Natural and Tangible Interfaces for Spatial Information

Kurzbeschreibung

"Maps become a user interface to many things [...] Geography is another way, a different way, to organise information." Financial Times 21.5.2008

Since 6000 years humans have used maps to navigate through space and solve other spatial tasks. Nearly all of time maps were drawn or printed on a piece of paper (or on material like stone or papyrus) of a certain size. Thus the two most common interaction methods were: (i) Holding the map in both hands (ii) or putting the map on a tabletop and perform specific tasks. Nowadays maps can be displayed on a wide range of electronic devices, starting from small screen mobile devices or highly interactive large multi-touch screen and of course the “old interaction schemas” cannot be applied anymore. In this talk I will highlight new natural and tangible interfaces that allow navigating through digital spatial information transferring the “old interaction schemas”. Starting from mobile augmented reality interfaces, mobile projection interfaces, or even large scale interactive multi-touch interfaces.

In addition I will present a first look into our new “Innovative Retail Lab”. The Innovative Retail Laboratory (IRL) is an application-oriented research laboratory of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), which was installed in the head office of the German chain store GLOBUS SB-Warenhaus Holding in St. Wendel. This close cooperation with Globus experts provides the individual projects with the possibility to concentrate on the precise demands and potentials of future self-service stores and accelerates the implementation of research results. Both topics seems very different, but I think there are many interesting parallels.

Vita

Currently I am working at the Innovative Retail Laboratory of the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence DFKI in Saarbrücken. Prof. Dr. Antonio Krüger is leading our lab. In addition I am working with Michael Rohs at the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin. I received a Diploma in „Geoinformatik“ at the University of Münster at the Institute for Geoinformatics in 2007. My research interests are new methods and interfaces to intuitive navigate through spatial information or in general new intelligent interfaces that help people to solve daily tasks more effectively: Mobile augmented reality applications, Wikipedia as a knowledge database and home grown multi-touch surfaces are just some of my areas of interest. I organized the first FTIR Multi-Touch Workshop, held in Münster in 2007 and the follow up bootcamp „Build-your-own“ Multi-touch Surface in conjunction with IEEE Tabletops 2008 in Amsterdam.

Letzte änderung am 23.06.2009