Innovative user interface: Skinput

People often complain about have-seen-before presentation on conference. In contrast to that, I think Skinput [1] should be really exciting...



[1]Harrison, C., Tan, D. Morris, D. 2010. Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface. To appear in Proceedings of the 28th Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI '10. ACM, New York, NY.

CfP - 5th Annual ACM Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2010

The Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2010 Conference (ITS) is a premiere venue for presenting research in the design and use of new and emerging tabletop and interactive surface technologies. As a new community, we embrace the growth of the discipline in a wide variety of areas, including innovations in ITS hardware, software, design, and projects expanding our understanding of design considerations of ITS technologies and of their applications.

5th Annual ACM Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2010

ITS 2010

November 7-10, 2010

Saarbrücken, Germany

http://www.its2010.org

Visiting Andreas Butz's group in Munich

Finally, I got the chance to go Munich again. On the way I took the opportunity to visit the group of Andreas Butz at LMU. Sebastian showed me his impressive Demo of interacting with large screen by touching on the see-through image from the iphone - augmented reality interaction with display, what a nice idea [1].
Yaxi presented me a visualization of music tastes of different users. I specifically liked this work as it might be well combined with Appaware, too. I also got the chance to learn about Curve [3], a vertical-horizontal interface for workspaces. Currently, it is still difficult to motivate the advantage to a screen, but I'm pretty sure they come up with compelling apps soon, as the combination of diplaying, interacting and sensing in these two dimensions is really fascinating.
Finally, I learned from Alexander about ColoPin [4], a really smart idea that combines colors and numbers in way that you can't spy on the PIN by looking over someone's shoulder.
Overall, I enjoyed the visit very much.




[1] Sebastian Boring, Dominikus Baur, Andreas Butz, Sean Gustafson, Patrick Baudisch
Touch Projector: Mobile Interaction-Through-Video
To Appear: In Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI 2010, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, Apr. 2010
[2] Yaxi Chen, Sebastian Boring, Andreas Butz
How Last.fm Illustrates the Musical World: User Behavior and Relevant User-Generated Content To appear in Proceedings of the international workshop on Visual Interfaces to the Social and Semantic Web, VISSW 2010, Hong Kong, China, February 17. Proceedings. (bib)
[3] Raphael Wimmer, Florian Schulz, Fabian Hennecke, Sebastian Boring, Heinrich Hussmann
Curve: Blending Horizontal and Vertical Interactive Surfaces
Adjunct Proceedings of the 4th IEEE Workshop on Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces (IEEE Tabletop 2009), Banff, Canada, Nov. 2009 (bib)
[4] Alexander De Luca, Katja Hertzschuch, Heinrich Hussmann
ColorPIN - Securing PIN Entry through Indirect Input
To appear in proceedings of CHI 2010. Atlanta, GA, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010. (bib)

At the GS1 Marketplace

Just two weeks ago Stephan Karpischek and I did another trip to Brussels in order to present My2Cents at the GS1 Global Forum. Among all the supply-chain applications GS1 has initially started it was really refreshing to see the several mobile applications coming up that enable also small retailers to retrieve information about the issuing authority of barcodes, e.g. using Mobile GEPIR. With My2Cents we even went a step further showing how actually consumers themselves can add comments about products and can retrieve the impressions and opinions of others. Obviously, the herb bouilons (only available in Switzerland) we've chosen as sample product for commenting have raised so much interest that some of them have disappeared after our demonstration...

AppAware - outrageous adoption...

Just two weeks ago in my last blog entry I reported about Andrea's first release of AppAware. We already got a thousand users after the first day, it was just incredible.
The week after it got even better when different blogs started talking about AppAware. Currently we have about 5000 active users creating more than 10.000 events (i.e. install/remove/update) per day!!! That means if you have the app running on your phone almost every second you receive update.

This massive adoption actually motivated Andrea to take the next step: to allow to filter for local events only. Accordingly, you can find out which applications are being used and installed around you. So if you arrive in a new city you can find out which apps are being used there...try your self it's really exciting!