Visual life stories for social reminiscence

Hosting University

University College Dublin

Overview

This two person project focuses on the development of Memoir, a system for aiding reminiscence activities by groups. Through our previous research involving users study with elders in Australia using cultural probes, we identified that a common memory aid is a photo album or scrapbook in which items are collected and preserved. Our subsequent research in Memento and SharePic showed that memory sharing and dissemination with physical-digital scrapbooks and tabletop photo sharing devices affords users a rich set of memory aids and social opportunities beyond the classical desktop screen and mouse currently employed.

The students working on this project will build two demonstrator applications relying on the same data set (a large geocoded collection of photos) in addition to a rich social network data set. The first demonstrator is a 3D visual presentation and annotation tool built on top of a physical Diamondtouch device (for collaborative interaction) and using Google Earth (or an open source equivalent). With location and time data this system will present 3D trails, overlaid on 2D maps, of peoples movement through the physical environment over the course of a day, week, month, year or lifetime. Current technologies do not track our every position but in the future we may carry devices that catalogue our positions throughout our life. These 3D trails will allow people to compare and contrast two visits to the same location in addition to presenting a novel and highly intuitive visual search system, that current photo catalogue systems cannot match. A novel and leading edge research aspect of this project is the exploration of a 3D trail bundling algorithm akin to edge bundling (InfoVis 2006).

The second student will explore the visual exploration of such a large photo corpus from the point of view of each persons social network. A social network is a representation of the people we know and whom those people subsequently know. Here the research will focus on the visual presentation or a medium sized social network which can be searched, annotated and used as a tool for social reminiscence on a tabletop interface, such as the Diamondtouch. The aim is to use the photographic collection as the interface while the set of follow on photos from the current one is driven by your social network and the meta data associated with each photo (event, location, weather, people etc.)

The research methods and technologies students will be introduced to include hermenutic, user studies, GPS, Meta-data (XIF), Image manipulation, OpenGL, Jung and tabletop computing on the Diamondtouch. Students who complete these projects we have learnt the end to end data visualisation pipeline, including data management techniques, 3D programming, gesture recognition and meta-data specifications and experimentation.

Relevance to Host Laboratory

This project will see two summer scholars working with a team including an academic, a postdoc and two postgraduate students. This team's work on the visualisation of voluminous census data with map presentation and FlowMap algorithms won them the best poster award at the 2nd CASCON Dublin Symposium 2006 and an honorable mention at the IEEE Information Visualisation Conference contest 2006. These scholars will work closely in our Pervasive Visualisation team in the Imaging, Visualisation \& Graphics Laboratory, based in the School of Computer Science and Informatics in UCD. The laboratory is currently supported by UCD's Computer Services (IBM Visualisation Cluster \EUR~ 30k), UCD's CSI (Projector, install and maintenance \EUR~ 30), Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (DiamondTouch \EUR~ 10k) and IBM CAS Dublin (DCV install and maintenance).

Supervisor

Dr. Aaron Quigley      Dr. Benoit Gaudin      Brendan Sheehan      Mike Bennett     

Students who have worked on this project: