The paper describes the design story of the ColorTable, a tangible user interface in support of urban planners and diverse stakeholders collaboratively envisioning urban change, which was developed in an iterative process of design-evaluation-feedback-redesign in a series of workshops with users in the context of real urban planning projects. It seeks to clarify a number of more general design issues related to tangible user interfaces -- how to make use of material and spatial properties in designing both, physical interface and multiple and simultaneous interactions; how to handle the complexity of urban projects while keeping interfaces and interactions simple and transparent.

The paper describes the design story of the ColorTable, a tangible user interface in support of urban planners and diverse stakeholders collaboratively envisioning urban change, which was developed in an iterative process of design-evaluation-feedback-redesign in a series of workshops with users in the context of real urban planning projects. It seeks to clarify a number of more general design issues related to tangible user interfaces -- how to make use of material and spatial properties in designing both, physical interface and multiple and simultaneous interactions; how to handle the complexity of urban projects while keeping interfaces and interactions simple and transparent.

This paper discusses technological interventions in support of planners, citizens and other stakeholders in envisioning and nego-tiating an urban project. A set of prototypal tools, including a tangible user interface, has been developed that allow users to create and manipulate visual/auditory scenes and mesh these scenes with the real environment of an urban site. The paper discusses how toallsupport users - different types of stakeholders - in the collaborative creation of mixed reality configurations as an integral part of expressing their ideas about an urban project, distinguishing between different types and levels of cooperation. It also looks into how to use mixed reality tools for enhancing an already highly developed representational culture.

This paper addresses design agendas in Human-Computer Interaction and neighbouring fields motivated by the mixing of areas that were mostly kept separate until recently, such as media studies, performing arts, computing, and ubiquitous or tangible interfaces. Referring to new developments in this interdisciplinary research area, and moving from three specific design cases, this paper proposes a critical design agenda that pragmatically joins: concepts from media studies, tangible or ubiquitous media design concerns, anthropological perspectives to performance and practices of theatre performance.

MonkeyBridge is a collaborative Augmented Reality (AR) game employing autonomous animated agents embodied by lifelike, animated virtual characters and "smart" physical objects. The game serves as a pilot application to examine how "smart" software and hardware components capable of observing and reacting to events in the physical and virtual world can be useful in AR applications. We describe the implementation details of our test setups as well as how autonomous agents offer a rich gaming experience in AR games.

Contrast in image processing is usually defined as a ratio between the darkest and the brightest spots of an image. In this paper we introduce a different contrast definition. The newly introduced Global Contrast Factor (GCF) corresponds closer to the human perception of contrast. GCF uses contrasts at various resolution levels in order to compute overall contrast. Experiments were conducted in order to find weight factors needed to calculate GCF. GCF measures richness of detail as perceived by a human observer, and as such can be used in various application areas like rendering, tone mapping, volume visualization, and lighting design.

Digital puppets are animated personas that augment online educational materials with commentary and summaries. Their animations are generated dynamically based on user-authored text, contextual hints, and domain goals, allowing the puppet to act with limited autonomy within specific domains. In this paper we describe the graphical realization and authoring of a 2D digital puppet. We present a build-once, use-forever production path that allows us to quickly create new character behaviors, and makes the production of 2D personas feasible. We describe two digital puppet applications and explain how the animation capability is supported across domains.

In many environments the landscape of space and artefacts is evolving and changing with the tasks at hand. Integrating digital media and computation in these environments has to take into account that users will configure space, functions and tools according to the situation, organizing use in unexpected ways. In this article we present and discuss how the issue of configurability is dealt with in a series of field trials with design students. The aim of these trials was to construct for architecture and interaction design students a mixed media environment for inspirational learning. We give examples from two rounds of field trials. In the first round emphasize was given to introduce components integrating dynamic digital media into the design studio practice of the students. One of the important findings from this first round was that integration becomes particularly useful when it facilitates the creation of composite representations called mixed objects blending digital and non-digital media in one design artifact. We did however also find that configurability has to be supported at different levels (infrastructures, artefacts, functions) and across physical and digital realm. From the second round of field trials examples are presented of component assemblies that provide a tangible formatting of the mixed media environment suitable for design work and two different approaches to end-user configuration of these component assemblies are described. Based on the results from the second round of field trials the concluding discussion suggests design principles relevant when integrating digital media and computation in design studios.

This paper introduces a tangible user interface for browsing and retrieving images from an image database. The basis for the query to the image database is a color layout sketch, which is used by the underlying query algorithm to find the best matches. The users are provided with colored cubes of various sizes and colors. The users can place and arrange the colored cubes on a small table to create a color layout sketch. Multiple users can use this interface to collaborate in an image query. To evaluate the benefits of the interface, it is compared to a traditional GUI application in which the users use a mouse to paint a color layout sketch. The tangible interface appears to be easier to use and better accepted by people who belive they are unable to draw or paint or who do not want to use computer.

This paper describes Sensitive Samples everyday artifacts turned into tangible user interfaces, while preserving their original look. The solution presented is inexpensive and is build on fairly simple technology. The system supports multiple samples simultaneously. Sensitive Samples were tested at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Various objects, ranging from a simple paper cube up to complex architecture models were turned into sensitive samples. The technical realization and two application examples The Control Cube and Materialkammer are described in the paper. The Control Cube can be used to trigger six different actions. Materialkammer describes an inspirational learning environment where architecture students can get familiar with materials in an unconventional way.

In many environments, the landscape of space and artefacts is evolving and changing with the tasks at hand. Integrating digital media and computation in these environments has to take into account the fact that people will configure space functions and tools according to the situation, organising use in unexpected ways. In this article, we present and discuss how the issue of configurability is dealt with, in a series of field trials with design students. The aim of these trials was to construct, for architecture and interaction design students, a mixed-media environment for inspirational learning. The results include physical infrastructure in space and in furniture as integral parts of the interaction technology and the creation of composite representations called “mixed objects‘’, which blend digital and non-digital media in one design artefact. Configurability has to be supported at different levels (infrastructures, artefacts, functions) and across the physical and digital realms.

We present several physical interfaces and how we assembled them to develop an environment for learning architecture design. Among others we are developing applications with barcode scanners, touch sensors, RFID tags, infrared remote control, video tracking, GPS receivers, and sensor boxes with electronic compass and acceleration sensors. In the environment input and output components are connected through an infrastructure. In a first round of experiments we have co-developed the components with the students for their practical design projects. We reflect on which features of the diverse prototype we developed contribute to understand configurability and integration with the environment.

In this paper we describe an advanced user interface enabling even playing games in an immersive virtual environment. There are no common input devices, users presence in the environment, movements, and body postures are the available tools for interaction. Furthermore, a publicly accessible installation in the Vienna Museum of Technology implementing such an advanced environment is described. In this installation computers are completely hidden, and it is one of the most popular exhibits in the museum, which has been accessed by more than 200,000 visitors since September 1999.

. In order to avoid these problems and also tomitigate the effect of the inevitable limitations ofsystems dependent on purely vision-based usertracking (e.g. the unreliable recognition of posturesor gestures), the Invisible Person was designed to besuggestive of adequate kinds of interaction. Its lackof a face or fingered hands relates to the coarseresolution of the vision, while its child-sizeappearance shall encourage sequences of short andwell-defined actions (as well as lower...

In this work we present a novel concept for designing and discussing the relationship between physical and digital elements in tangible user interfaces (TUI's). The notion of tokens and constraints (TAC) was formulated by Shear et al. in 2004 and describes a TUI as a set of relationships between tokens, their variables and one or more constraints each. We expand and generalize this and other concepts by introducing poken as part of a token. Our interaction model of pokens and variables enables the specification of a broader range of TUI's.