Annual Report 2010 - Fachgruppe Informatik an der RWTH Aachen ...

Overview
The Media Computing Group at RWTH Aachen University conducts research in Media
Computing and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) that goes beyond today’s graphical user
interface and desktop metaphor. Grounded in computer science, we develop and study new
interaction theories, techniques, and systems in the areas of interaction with multimedia
ubiquitous computing environments, tangible user interfaces, and HCI design patterns. Our
goal is to make the Brave New World of ubiquitous multimedia technologies useful by
making it usable.
New media technologies, such as interactive TV or electronic books, often distinguish
themselves through their capability for interaction. Their user interface, however, lags far
behind its technological potential: today’s “media players” still largely resemble a 1950’s tape
recorder. Multimedia interaction is stuck in the 30-year-old desktop metaphor—perfect for
document work, but not for media processing. This bottleneck is giving HCI a significance
push similar to the explosion of Computer Graphics in the 1990’s. It enables, but also requires
us to rethink some central paradigms of interacting with information, especially time-based
media.
New interaction techniques can re-enable established routines from the pre-digital world, or
create new ones unique to the interactive medium. Our interactive exhibits, for example,
enable users to interact with the rich structure of musical data streams—to find a piece in a
musical database by humming it, improvise to a piece with computer support, or conduct an
actual audio and video recording of the Vienna Philharmonic. This inevitably leads to
fundamental research questions in computer science, such as real-time time stretching of A/V
streams, conducting gesture recognition, and cognitive modeling of the human conducting
process.
Beyond such individual systems lies the realm of media spaces, entire environments in which
several key dimensions of complexity increase—multiple users interact with multiple media,
using multiple systems, devices, and applications. History has shown that, as technology
matures, it fades into the background of a newly augmented reality, instead of leading to
virtual realities. But which devices and interaction modalities, if any, will be playing an
equally dominant role in this post-desktop scenario as mouse, keyboard, and monitor in
today’s desktop-centered systems? We have built the Aachen Media Space at our department,
a next-generation interactive environment, to further explore this exciting new area of
research.
Trying to prototype new, physical post-desktop user interfaces for such interactive spaces has
led us to the development of toolkits for physical computing. As a result, questions such as
how to handle inevitable latency in a decentralized user interface, new forms of feedback, and
preferred modalities when interacting with media in such environments, have become better
understood.
The increasing momentum in this field also calls for new, more efficient ways to capture,
structure, discuss, and ultimately formalize and standardize the rapidly growing body of
knowledge and experience in interaction technologies and techniques with multimedia. One
way to express and distribute this kind of knowledge are our Interaction Design Patterns,
combining the advantages of existing widely used formats such as general design guidelines,
design rationale, and specific style guides.
336