User Interface Design for Wearable Augmented Reality Systems

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Speaker
Steven Feiner
Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

What should user interfaces look like when they become an integral part of how we experience the world around us? I will provide an overview of the work being done by Columbia’s Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Laboratory to explore user interface design issues for wearable augmented reality systems. Our augmented reality systems use tracked see-through and hear-through displays to overlay virtual graphics and sound on the real world. Such systems must function indoors and outdoors, both stand-alone and together with many other displays, devices, and users, into and out of whose presence we move. I will describe research prototypes that exploit a mix of display and interaction technologies. One example that I will present allows a mobile user to experience situated documentaries—multimedia news stories that are interwoven with the actual sites at which the events took place, immersing the user in a georeferenced, spatialized hypertext. As we have developed these prototypes, it has become clear to us that the use of tracked see-through displays has a profound effect on the user interface, in large part because virtual objects appear in the same surrounding space as other users and physical objects. Thus, as a user’s head moves, or anything visible through their see-through display moves, the user’s combined view of the virtual and physical world also changes. For example, a static virtual object intended to be viewed next to a physical object may suddenly obscure or be obscured by it or other objects. To address these problems, we are experimenting with view management—automated interactive control of the geometry of virtual objects to maintain desired visual relationships between them and other physical and virtual objects.

Speaker's Bio

Steven Feiner (http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~feiner) is a Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, where he directs the Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Laboratory (http://graphics.cs.columbia.edu/). He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University in 1987. Prof. Feiner’s research interests include virtual environments and augmented reality, knowledge-based design of graphics and multimedia, wearable computing, information visualization, and hypermedia. He is coauthor of Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice (Addison-Wesley, 1990) and of Introduction to Computer Graphics (Addison-Wesley, 1993). He is an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Graphics, has served on the executive boards of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics, and the IEEE Computer Society Task Force on Human-Centered Information Systems, and is a member of the steering committees for the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, the IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Wearable Information Systems. Prof. Feiner is program co-chair for the 2003 IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers. Over the past few years, he has been general chair of IEEE Information Visualization 2001, symposium co-chair of the 2001 IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Augmented Reality, program co-chair of the 2001 International Symposium on Mixed Reality, and program co-chair of IEEE Virtual Reality 2000. In 1991 he received an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award.

Speaker's Website
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~feiner/