Odysseus

The need for technology to support general face-to-face collaborative activities such as planning, layout, design and data exploration has prompted researchers to develop large shared displays and touch driven multi-user input devices. Devices such as the DiamondTouch and SmartSkin provide the first step to the provision of more natural, touch-driven interfaces for groups working together. Such interfaces are both natural in terms of their coffee table form factor, and intuitive in terms of their flat orientation for collaborative face to face activities. In parallel to these developments, we have seen the growing use of small mobile devices (phones, PDAs, Blackberry) and sustained developments in the Tablet PC platform. All of these non traditional interfaces go beyond the current desktop metaphor and classical screen, keyboard and mouse input modalities.

Some developers view certain activities as being for a single user tied to one class of computing device. While this is certainly true of current applications it is also clear that certain applications live beyond the boundaries of any one operating system, service or application. A system which couples an IM client, email and SMS is an example of a communications activity that can be accessed from a range of devices and from a range of applications. It is an activity supported by an ensemble of services, interfaces, devices and applications.

We view an activity such as data exploration supported by visualisation as an ensemble activity which needs to support multiple people, across multiple devices, across varying modalities where people studying the data can take a public, shared or private view that can be exchanged, merged or sorted for understanding and knowledge sharing.

Personal computing using devices such as desktops, laptops, tablets, phones and PDAs are useful for certain aspects of activities but typically they do not have the scale or resolution required for the display of large graphical models in a multiuser environment. The need for large high resolution displays that support large graphical models has lead to the emergence of projects such as Chromium or IBM's Deep Computing Visualization toolkits. These systems afford us the opportunity to couple together commodity personal computers or higher powered Blade systems and displays, to create large high quality yet low-cost display environments.

Project
This project will develop an system to allow a Tablet PC to be used as a window into a large scale data visualisation (driven by DCV) which can be oriented dynamically and hence changing the angle and location of the viewpoint within a 3D environment.

Relevance of Project to the Host Laboratories:

This project will see a summer scholar developing a small demonstrator system built on their integration of a customised VNC viewer on a Windows Tablet PC, the ARtoolkit with the Deep Computing Toolkit. This scholar will also work in conjunction with a PhD student who is researching aspects of a larger "Pervasive Visualisation" system for the IVG. IVG is an Imaging, Visualisation & Graphics Laboratory, based in the School of Computer Science and Informatics in UCD and is a new facility of the Institute of Integrated Informatics. This multi-disciplinary laboratory supports collaboration between a number of schools, international collaborators and industrial partners. The laboratory is currently supported by UCD's Computer Services (IBM Visualisation Cluster) and UCD's CSI. With equipment and software from Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (DiamondTouch) and IBM's Deep Computing Visualization system.

Supervisors:

Dr. Aaron Quigley and Dr. Hamish Carr (Computer Science and Informatics, UCD)

Keywords:

Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Distributed Computing, Pervasive Computing.

Links:

http://www.merl.com/projects/DiamondTouch/
http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/deepcomputing/visualization/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VNC