[Colloq] Hiring Visit Brian Wigdor TODAY Monday Feb 25

[Meryl Hamilton]

Towards useful and usable multi-touch systems

                                by

 Daniel Wigdor
              University of Toronto and Mitsubishi Labs

        Monday, February 25, 2008, 10:30 a.m.
                      366 West Village Bldg. H


Multi-touch and multi-user systems have recently garnered much attention,
enabled by new technologies and openness to new input paradigms. Interfaces
built for these technologies are immediately compelling: users can engage
with the system in new ways, with higher degrees of input freedom, new types
of parallelism, and a reduced gap between data and input. Despite these and
other advantages, commercial implementations have largely been anticipated
by nearly 20 years in the research community. The current state of the art
leads us to ask: "now we have multi-touch: we can pinch, zoom, pan, and
draw. What comes next?"

In this talk, I will give an overview of research in multi-touch systems. I
will describe our early-stages work seeking to begin to move past the 'wow'
factor of such devices, towards systems which are truly usable by and useful
to their users, and which offer real advantages over traditional systems. I
will describe our multifaceted approach of employing both bottom-up and
top-down techniques to building our 'table-centric interactive space', which
has included studies of long-term use, an examination of perceptual and
motor abilities, and, recently, in-situ group studies. This process has
yielded new interaction designs, novel direct-touch input paradigms, and new
knowledge of various relevant aspects of human performance, all of which are
helping to lead our research to its next phase.

Host: Carole Hafner