Section: New Results

Engineering of interactive systems

Participants : Caroline Appert, Michel Beaudouin-Lafon [correspondant] , Olivier Chapuis, Stéphane Huot, Wendy Mackay, Emmanuel Pietriga, Clément Pillias, Romain Primet.

INSITU continues to develop and apply toolkits to explore and implement interactive systems. Most of the projects listed in the Interaction Techniques section either build upon existing toolkits, e.g., Jelly Lenses to improve management of focus+context on a wall-sized display, or created new ones, e.g., BiPad to create various bimanual interaction techniques for hand-held tablets.

INSITU's primary testbed for exploring multi-surface interaction is the WILD Room [15] (Wall-sized Interaction with Large Datasets), a multisurface environment featuring a wall-sized display, a multitouch table, and various mobile devices. Our goal is to explore the next generation of interactive systems by distributing interaction across these diverse computing devices, enabling multiple users to easily and seamlessly create, share, and manipulate digital content. Our research strategy is to design an extreme environment that pushes the limits of technology – both hardware and software. To ground the design process, we work with extreme users – scientists whose daily work both inspires and stress-tests the environment as they seek to understand exceptionally large and complex datasets. The WILD room, and the soon-to-be-built WILDER room are part of DigiScope, a 22.5 Meuro “Equipement d'Excellence” project led by INSITU.

INSITU's collaboration with the ALMA radio-telescope on the design and implementation of user interfaces for operations monitoring and control continued this year [26] , and was eventually transferred to Inria Chile in July (see Section 8.4.2 ). The ALMA radio-telescope, currently under construction in northern Chile, is a very advanced instrument that presents numerous challenges. From a software perspective, one critical issue is the design of graphical user interfaces for operations monitoring and control that scale to the complexity of the system and to the massive amounts of data users are faced with. Early experience operating the telescope with only a few antennas showed that conventional, WIMP-based user interfaces are not adequate in this context. They consume too much screen real-estate, require many unnecessary interactions to access relevant information, and fail to provide operators and astronomers with a clear mental map of the instrument. They increase extraneous cognitive load, impeding tasks that call for quick diagnosis and action. To address this challenge, the ALMA software division adopted a user-centered design approach in collaboration with members of INSIUT. For the last two years, astronomers, operators, software engineers and human-computer interaction researchers from INSITU have been working on the design of better user interfaces based on state-of-the-art visualization techniques. This eventually led to the joint development of those interface components using various software toolkits, some of them developed at INSITU (Section 5.2 ).