Beat Signer | Vrije Universiteit Brussel (original) (raw)

Books by Beat Signer

While there have been dramatic increases in the use of digital technologies for information stora... more While there have been dramatic increases in the use of digital technologies for information storage, processing and delivery over the last twenty years, the affordances of paper have ensured its retention as a key information medium. In this book we review a wide variety of projects and technological developments for bridging the paper-digital divide. We present our information-centric approach for a tight integration of paper and digital information that is based on a general cross-media information platform. Different innovative augmented paper applications that have been developed based on our interactive paper platform and Anoto Digital Pen and Paper technology are introduced. For example, these applications include a mobile interactive paper-based tourist information system (EdFest) and a paper-digital presentation tool (PaperPoint). Challenges and solutions for new forms of interactive paper and cross-media publishing are discussed. The book is targeted at developers and researchers in information systems, hypermedia and human computer interaction, professionals from the printing and publishing industry as well as readers with a general interest in the future of paper.

Buy from Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fundamental-Concepts-Interactive-Cross-Media-Information/dp/3837027139

Interviews by Beat Signer

ACM SIGWEB Newsletter 2021(Winter), February 2021, 2021

Beat Signer is Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and codirect... more Beat Signer is Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and codirectorof the Web & Information Systems Engineering (WISE) research lab. He received a PhDin Computer Science from ETH Zurich where he has also been leading the Interactive Paper lab asa senior researcher for four years. He is an internationally distinguished expert in cross-media technologies and interactive paper solutions. His further research interests include human-information interaction, document engineering, data physicalisation, mixed reality as well as multimodal interaction. He has published more than 100 papers on these topics at international conferences and journals, and received multiple best paper awards.

Beat has 20 years of experience in research on cross-media information management and mul-timodal user interfaces. As part of his PhD research, he investigated the use of paper as an interactive user interface and developed the resource-selector-link (RSL) hypermedia metamodel. With the interactive paper platform (iPaper), he strongly contributed to the interdisciplinary European Paper++ and PaperWorks research projects and the seminal research on paper-digital user interfaces led to innovative cross-media publishing solutions and novel forms of paper-based human-computer interaction. The RSL hypermedia metamodel is nowadays widely applied in his research lab and has, for example, been used for cross-media personal information management, an extensible cross-document link service, the MindXpres presentation platform as well as in a framework for cross-device and Internet of Things applications. For more details, please visit https://beatsigner.com.

Flyers by Beat Signer

Overview of ongoing research in the CISA group (WISE research lab) at the Vrije Universiteit Brus... more Overview of ongoing research in the CISA group (WISE research lab) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The group is investigating cross-media information spaces and architectures, interactive paper and augmented reality solutions as well as multimodal and multi-touch interaction frameworks. Thereby, we are doing research on new document formats for representing information across different types of media as well as fluid user interfaces for interacting with the resulting cross-media information spaces. A significant part of our research is based on applying and extending the resource-selector-link (RSL) hypermedia metamodel.

More information: https://beatsigner.com/cross-media-information-spaces-and-architectures.html

OpenHPS is an open source hybrid positioning system to help developers fuse various positioning t... more OpenHPS is an open source hybrid positioning system to help developers fuse various positioning technologies and algorithms

Papers by Beat Signer

The efficient management and retrieval of information via dedicated devices and data structures h... more The efficient management and retrieval of information via dedicated devices and data structures has been investigated since the early days of Vannevar Bush's seminal article As We May Think introducing the Memex. However, nowadays information is usually fragmented across different media types, devices as well as digital and physical environments, and we are often struggling to retrieve specific information. We discuss three main issues to be addressed when developing solutions for managing information in these co-called cross-media information spaces. First, we have a look at an extensible cross-media linking solution based on the resource-selector-link (RSL) hypermedia metamodel where information can be integrated across applications, devices as well as digital and physical information environments. We then outline some of the limitations of existing digital document formats which are often just a simulation of paper documents and their affordances on desktop computers, and discuss more flexible document representations for cross-media information spaces. Further, new forms of human-information interaction and cross-media user interfaces—including some recent work on dynamic data physicalisation—are discussed. A number of research artefacts are used to illustrate different aspects of the presented data-centric approach for cross-media information spaces and architectures. Last but not least, we provide an outlook on how the embedding of the presented concepts at the level of an operating system might ultimately lead to new possibilities for cross-media information management and innovative forms of human-information interaction.

The use of pens in human-computer interaction has been investigated since Ivan Sutherland's Sketc... more The use of pens in human-computer interaction has been investigated since Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad graphical communication system in the early 1960s. We provide an overview of the major developments in pen-based interaction over the last six decades and compare different hardware solutions and pen-tracking techniques. In addition to pen-based interaction with digital devices, we discuss more recent digital pen and paper solutions where pen and paper-based interaction is augmented with digital information and services. We outline different interface and interaction styles and present various academic as well as commercial application domains where pen-based interaction has been successfully applied. Furthermore, we discuss several issues to be considered when designing pen-based interactions and conclude with an outlook of potential future challenges and directions for penbased human-computer interaction.

Many of today's digital document formats are strongly based on a digital emulation of printed med... more Many of today's digital document formats are strongly based on a digital emulation of printed media. While such a paper simulation might be appropriate for the visualisation of certain digital content, it is generally not the most effective solution for digitally managing and storing information. The oversimplistic modelling of digital documents as monolithic blocks of linear content, with a lack of structural semantics, does not pay attention to some of the superior features that digital media offers in comparison to traditional paper documents. For example, existing digital document formats adopt the limitations of paper documents by unnecessarily replicating content via copy and paste operations, instead of digitally embedding and reusing parts of digital documents via structural references. We introduce a conceptual model for structural cross-media content composition and highlight how the proposed solution not only enables the reuse of content via structural relationships, but also supports dynamic and context-dependent document adaptation, structural content annotations as well as the integration of arbitrary non-textual media types. We further discuss solutions for the fluid navigation and cross-media content publishing based on the proposed structural cross-media content model.

Advanced data visualisation techniques enable the exploration and analysis of large datasets. Rec... more Advanced data visualisation techniques enable the exploration and analysis of large datasets. Recently, there is the emerging field of data physicalisation, where data is represented in physical space (e.g. via physical models) and can no longer only be explored visually, but also by making use of other senses such as touch. Most existing data physicalisation solutions are static and cannot be dynamically updated based on a user's interaction. Our goal is to develop a framework for new forms of dynamic data physicalisation in order to support an interactive exploration and analysis of datasets. Based on a study of the design space for dynamic data physicalisation, we are therefore working on a grammar for representing the fundamental physical operations and interactions that can be applied to the underlying data. Our envisioned extensible data physicalisation framework will enable the rapid prototyping of dynamic data physicalisations and thereby support researchers who want to experiment with new combinations of physical variables or output devices for dynamic data physicalisation as well as designers and application developers who are interested in the development of innovative dynamic data physicalisation solutions.

Long before the advent of personal computing, Vannevar Bush envisioned the Memex as a solution to... more Long before the advent of personal computing, Vannevar Bush envisioned the Memex as a solution to address information overload by enhancing the management and refinding of information through associative trails. While other hypertext pioneers like Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson introduced advanced hypertext concepts to create more flexible document structures and augment the human intellect, some of their original ideas are still absent in our daily interaction with documents and information systems. Today, many digital document formats mimic paper documents without fully leveraging the opportunities offered by digital media and documents are often organised in hierarchical file structures. In this keynote, we explore how cross-media technologies, such as the resource-selector-link (RSL) hypermedia metamodel, can be used to organise and interact with information across digital and physical spaces. While emerging wearable mixed reality (MR) headsets offer new possibilities to augment the human intellect, we discuss how hypermedia research, in combination with other technologies, could play a major role in providing the necessary linked data and hypertext infrastructure for this augmentation process. We outline the challenges and opportunities for next-generation multimodal human-information interaction enabled by flexible cross-media information spaces and document structures in combination with upcoming mixed and virtual reality solutions.

Over the last few years, there has been a significant increase in the number of researchers deali... more Over the last few years, there has been a significant increase in the number of researchers dealing with the integration of paper and digital information or services. While recent technological developments enable new forms of paper-digital integration and interaction, some of the original research on interactive paper dates back almost twenty years. We give a brief overview of the most relevant past and current interactive paper developments. Then, based on our experience in developing a wide variety of interactive paper solutions over the last decade, as well as the results of other research groups, we outline future directions and challenges for the realisation of innovative interactive paper solutions. Further, we propose the definition of common data formats and interactive paper design patterns to ensure future cross-application and framework interoperability.

The last two decades have seen the emergence and steady development of tangible user interfaces. ... more The last two decades have seen the emergence and steady development of tangible user interfaces. While most of these interfaces are applied for input—with output still on traditional computer screens—the goal of programmable matter and actuated shape-changing materials is to directly use the physical objects for visual or tangible feedback. Advances in material sciences and flexible display technologies are investigated to enable such reconfigurable physical objects. While existing solutions aim for making physical objects more controllable via the digital world, we propose an approach where holograms (virtual objects) in a mixed reality environment are augmented with physical variables such as shape, texture or temperature. As such, the support for mobility forms an important contribution of the proposed solution since it enables users to freely move within and across environments. Furthermore, our augmented virtual objects can co-exist in a single environment with programmable matter and other actuated shape-changing solutions. The future potential of the proposed approach is illustrated in two usage scenarios and we hope that the presentation of our work in progress on a novel way to realise tangible holograms will foster some lively discussions in the CHI community.

Over the last few decades, we have seen massive improvements in computing power, but nevertheless... more Over the last few decades, we have seen massive improvements in computing power, but nevertheless we still rely on digital documents and file systems that were originally created by mimicking the characteristics of physical storage media with all its limitations. This is quite surprising given that even before the existence of the computer, Information Science visionaries such as Vannevar Bush described more powerful information management solutions. We therefore aim to improve the way information is managed in modern desktop environments by embedding a hypermedia engine offering rich hypermedia and cross-media concepts at the level of an operating system. We discuss the resource-selector-link (RSL) hypermedia metamodel as a candidate for realising such a general hypermedia engine and highlight its flexibility based on a number of domain-specific applications that have been developed over the last two decades. The underlying content repository will no longer rely on monolithic files, but rather contain a user's data in the form of content fragments, such as snippets of text or images, which are structurally linked to form the corresponding documents, and can be reused in other documents or even shared across computers. By increasing the scope to a system-wide hypermedia engine, we have to deal with fundamental challenges related to granularity, interoperability or context resolving. We strongly believe that computing technology has evolved enough to revisit and address these challenges, laying the foundation for a wide range of innovative use cases for efficiently managing cross-media content in modern desktop environments.

Positioning systems and frameworks use various techniques to determine the position of an object.... more Positioning systems and frameworks use various techniques to determine the position of an object. Some of the existing solutions combine different sensory data at the time of positioning in order to compute more accurate positions by reducing the error introduced by the used individual positioning techniques. We present OpenHPS, a generic hybrid positioning system implemented in TypeScript, that can not only reduce the error during tracking by fusing different sensory data based on different algorithms, but also also make use of combined tracking techniques when calibrating or training the system. In addition to a detailed discussion of the architecture, features and implementation of the extensible open source OpenHPS framework, we illustrate the use of our solution in a demonstrator application fusing different positioning techniques. While OpenHPS offers a number of positioning techniques, future extensions might integrate new positioning methods or algorithms and support additional levels of abstraction including symbolic locations.

In today's technological world of privacy-conscious users, the tracking of individuals via differ... more In today's technological world of privacy-conscious users, the tracking of individuals via different positioning systems and services can be considered obtrusive. Furthermore, linking and integrating data from these positioning systems is not always possible or requires the major effort of creating new interfaces between systems. In this paper, we propose an architecture for the realisation of a decentralised positioning system based on the W3C's Solid platform specification. Using this specification, sensor data as well as an individual's location information is stored in secure decentralised data stores called Pods, that are hosted by user-selected Pod providers. We demonstrate that these Pods do not only offer transparent and interoperable data stores for persisting sensor data as well as processed location information, but also aid in linking multiple positioning systems for high-and low-level sensor fusion. For indoor positioning, this interoperability provides a way to offer users a single location-based service while also providing additional semantic context for other positioning systems to improve their data output. Developers of indoor positioning systems can store all data in a format that is readable, understandable and accessible by any other system that their users might be using, enabling collaboration between researchers and companies implementing these indoor positioning systems.

Hybrid positioning frameworks use various sensors and algorithms to enhance positioning through d... more Hybrid positioning frameworks use various sensors and algorithms to enhance positioning through different types of fusion. The optimisation of the fusion process requires the testing of different algorithm parameters and optimal lowas well as high-level sensor fusion techniques. The presented OpenHPS open source hybrid positioning system is a modular framework managing individual nodes in a process network, which can be configured to support concrete positioning use cases or to adapt to specific technologies. This modularity allows developers to rapidly develop and optimise their positioning system while still providing them the flexibility to add their own algorithms. In this paper we discuss how a process network developed with OpenHPS can be used to realise a customisable indoor positioning solution with an offline and online stage, and how it can be adapted for high accuracy or low latency. For the demonstration and validation of our indoor positioning solution, we further compiled a publicly available dataset containing data from WLAN access points, BLE beacons as well as several trajectories that include IMU data.

Existing presentation tools and document formats show a number of shortcomings in terms of the ma... more Existing presentation tools and document formats show a number of shortcomings in terms of the management, visualisation and navigation of rich cross-media content. While slideware was originally designed for the production of physical transparencies, there is an increasing need for richer and more interactive media types. We investigate innovative forms of organising, visualising and navigating presentations. This includes the introduction of a new document format supporting the integration or transclusion of content from different presentations and cross-media sources as well as the non-linear navigation of presentations. We present MindXpres, a web technology-based extensible platform for content-driven cross-media presentations. The modular architecture and plug-in mechanism of MindXpres enable the reuse or integration of new visualisation and interaction components. Our MindXpres prototype forms a platform for the exploration and rapid prototyping of innovative concepts for presentation tools. Its support for multi-device user interfaces further enables an active participation of the audience which should ultimately result in more dynamic, engaging presentations and improved knowledge transfer.

Beat Signer is Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and co-direc... more Beat Signer is Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and co-director of the Web & Information Systems Engineering (WISE) research lab. He received a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich where he has also been leading the Interactive Paper lab as a senior researcher for four years. He is an internationally distinguished expert in cross-media technologies and interactive paper solutions. His further research interests include human-information interaction, document engineering, data physicalisation, mixed reality as well as multimodal interaction. He has published more than 100 papers on these topics at international conferences and journals, and received multiple best paper awards.

Buy from Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fundamental-Concepts-Interactive-Cross-Media-Information/dp/3837027139

ACM SIGWEB Newsletter 2021(Winter), February 2021, 2021

More information: https://beatsigner.com/cross-media-information-spaces-and-architectures.html

The field of Computing Education Research (CER) produces important insights into learning and not... more The field of Computing Education Research (CER) produces important insights into learning and notable interventions, yet due to the research/practice divide these do not have the desired impact on learners or practitioners. Even within CER, Computing Education (CE) learning theories have limited influence on learning designs due to the theory/design divide, which is unfortunate given that the goal of CER is to impact learners and broaden access to computation.

There is a lack of an overarching model defining CER as a unified field and providing a framework for discussion. While there is discussion around many of the core activities and practices in CER, we have yet to come across a holistic characterisation. We introduce a model of Translational Computing Education Research (TCER) that helps to understand and discuss CER as a field, bridge the divides and provide internal structure, while also making the field more approachable for interdisciplinary and non-academic collaborators. In our TCER model, theory and design are equally important but weighted differently depending on an activity's position along the research/practice continuum.

In addition to the future exploration and exploitation of the presented TCER model, we propose further characterising CER as a field, applying the TCER model to understand past and contemporary CER, applying the model to address current challenges in CER, imagining what the field can become, as well as exploring the potential for translational research programmes to maximise the broader impact of computing education research.

While satellite-based positioning systems are mainly used in outdoor environments, various other ... more While satellite-based positioning systems are mainly used in outdoor environments, various other positioning techniques exist for different domains and use cases, including indoor or underground settings. The representation of spatial data via semantic linked data is well addressed by existing spatial ontologies. However, there is a primary focus on location data with its specific geographical context, but a lack of solutions for describing the different types of data generated by a positioning system and the used sampling techniques to obtain the data. In this paper we introduce a new generic Positioning System Ontology (POSO) that is built on top of the Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) and Sensor, Observation, Sample, and Actuator (SOSA) ontologies. With POSO, we provide missing concepts needed for describing a positioning system and its output with known positioning algorithms and techniques in mind. Thereby, we enable the improvement of hybrid positioning systems making use of multiple platforms and sensors that are described via the presented POSO ontology.

We introduce the Explorotron Visual Studio Code extension for guided and independent code explora... more We introduce the Explorotron Visual Studio Code extension for guided and independent code exploration and learning. Explorotron is a continuation of earlier work to explore how we can enable small organisations with limited resources to provide pedagogically sound learning experiences in programming. We situate Explorotron in the field of Computing Education Research (CER) and envision it to initiate a discussion around different topics, including how to balance the optimisation between the researcher-student-teacher trifecta that is inherent in CER, how to ethically and responsibly use large language models (LLMs) in the independent learning and exploration by students, and how to define better learning sessions over coding content that students obtained on their own. We further reflect on the question raised by Begel and Ko whether technology should "structure learning for learners" or whether learners should "be taught how to structure their own independent learning" outside of the classroom.

With the emergence of smart TVs, set-top boxes and public information screens over the last few y... more With the emergence of smart TVs, set-top boxes and public information screens over the last few years, there is an increasing demand to no longer use these appliances only for passive output. These devices can also be used to do text-based web search as well as other tasks which require some form of text input. However, the design of text entry interfaces for efficient input on such appliances represents a major challenge. With current virtual keyboard solutions we only achieve an average text input rate of 5.79 words per minute (WPM) while the average typing speed on a traditional keyboard is 38 WPM. Furthermore, so-called controller-free appliances such as Samsung's Smart TV or Microsoft's Xbox Kinect result in even lower average text input rates. We present SpeeG2, a multimodal text entry solution combining speech recognition with gesture-based error correction. Four innovative prototypes for the efficient controller-free text entry have been developed and evaluated. A quantitative evaluation of our SpeeG2 text entry solution revealed that the best of our four prototypes achieves an average input rate of 21.04 WPM (without errors), outperforming current state-of-the-art solutions for controller-free text input.

A video about the system can be found at: https://www.academia.edu/11590838/SpeeG2

Recent developments in digital pen and paper solutions enable, not only the digital capture of ha... more Recent developments in digital pen and paper solutions enable, not only the digital capture of handwriting, but also paper to be used as an interactive medium that links to digital information and services. We present a tool that builds on technologies for interactive paper to enable PowerPoint presentations to be controlled from printed slide handouts. Furthermore, slides can be easily annotated during presentations by simply drawing on the printed version of the slide. As well as discussing the advantages of such a paper-based interface and initial findings on its use, we describe how we were also able to exploit it to provide a general prototyping tool for interactive paper applications.

Mainstream presentation tools such as Microsoft PowerPoint were originally built to mimic physica... more Mainstream presentation tools such as Microsoft PowerPoint were originally built to mimic physical media like photographic slides and still exhibit the same characteristics. However, the state of the art in presentation tools shows that more recent solutions start to go beyond the classic presentation paradigms. For instance, presentations are becoming increasingly non-linear, content is quickly evolving beyond simple text and images and the way we author our presentations is becoming more collaborative. Nevertheless, existing presentation content models are often based on assumptions that do not apply to the current state of presentations any more, making them incompatible for some use cases and limiting the potential of end-user presentation solutions. In order to support state-of-the-art presentation functionality, we rethink the concept of a presentation and introduce a conceptual framework for presentation content. We then present a new content model for presentation solutions based on the Resource-Selector-Link (RSL) hypermedia metamodel. We further discuss an implementation of our model and show some example use cases. We conclude by outlining how design choices in the model address currently unmet needs with regards to extensibility, content reuse, collaboration, semantics, user access management, non-linearity, and context awareness, resulting in better support for the corresponding end-user functionality in presentation tools.

Over the last decade, we have witnessed an emergence of Personal Information Management (PIM) sol... more Over the last decade, we have witnessed an emergence of Personal Information Management (PIM) solutions. Despite the fact that paper documents still form a significant part of our daily working activities, existing PIM systems usually support the organisation and re-finding of digital documents only. While physical document tracking solutions such as RFID- or computer vision-based systems are recently gaining some attention, they usually focus on the paper document tracking and offer limited support for re-finding activities. We present PimVis, a solution for exploring and re-finding digital and paper documents in so-called cross-media information spaces. The PimVis user interface enables a unified organisation of digital and paper documents through the creation of bidirectional links between the digital and physical information space. The presented personal cross-media information management solution further supports the extension with alternative document tracking techniques as well as augmented reality solutions. A formative PimVis evaluation revealed the high potential of fully integrated cross-media PIM solutions.

Seminar organised by Infogroep, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, March 2024

Seminar talk given for the Faculty of Education at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), Sout... more Seminar talk given for the Faculty of Education at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa.

Invited presentation given to students at Pandit Deendayal Energy University.

Guest lecture in the 'Hypertext and Hypernarratives' seminar organised by Prof. Claus Atzenbeck a... more Guest lecture in the 'Hypertext and Hypernarratives' seminar organised by Prof. Claus Atzenbeck at Hof University, online, June 2023

Webinar given at icity Lab Talks - The Digital Value Chain In this talk, I will first provide ... more Webinar given at icity Lab Talks - The Digital Value Chain

In this talk, I will first provide an overview of the lab’s research on a general data-driven approach for cross-media information system and architectures based on the resource-selector-link (RSL) hypermedia metamodel. We will then have a look at several cross-media applications for personal information management and next-generation presentation solutions (MindXpres). Finally, I will outline the lab’s most recent research on tangible interaction and dynamic data physicalisation.

Seminar talk delivered at Chalmers University, Sweden.

Seminar talk delivered at a seminar organised by infogroep.

Seminar talk delivered in the Global Information Systems lab at ETH Zurich.

Wat brengt de toekomst? Hoe ziet ze eruit? Wat betekent dit voor mij en de maatschappij? Moet ik ... more Wat brengt de toekomst? Hoe ziet ze eruit? Wat betekent dit voor mij en de maatschappij? Moet ik bang zijn of mag ik dromen? En waar zal de fun te beleven zijn?

"While there have been dramatic increases in the use of digital technologies for information stor... more "While there have been dramatic increases in the use of digital technologies for information storage, processing and delivery over the last few decades, the affordances of paper have ensured its retention as a key information medium. Despite predictions of the paperless office, paper is ever more present in our daily work. However, there is a gap between the paper and digital worlds: information present in paper documents cannot be seamlessly transferred to digital media and digital services are not easily accessible from the paper world.

In this talk I will present an information-centric approach for integrating paper with digital as well as physical media based on a general cross-media information platform (iServer). Some details about the architecture and implementation of the iServer platform as well as the underlying resource-selector-link (RSL) metamodel for cross-media linking will be highlighted. A selection of interactive paper applications that have been developed based on this platform over the past nine years will be presented, including the EdFest interactive paper guide for the Edinburgh festivals, the PaperPoint presentation tool as well as the PaperProof proof-editing solution. Challenges and solutions for novel forms of interactive paper and cross-media publishing are discussed based on the presented applications. This includes specific extensions of the iServer platform and RSL model as well as the application of our solution in new domains such as digital libraries, cross-media annotation and retrieval or personal cross-media information management that goes beyond the hierarchical information management imposed by the desktop metaphor."

"While there have been dramatic increases in the use of digital technologies for information stor... more "While there have been dramatic increases in the use of digital technologies for information storage, processing and delivery over the last few decades, the affordances of paper have ensured its retention as a key information medium. Despite predictions of the paperless office, paper is ever more present in our daily work. However, there is a gap between the paper and digital worlds: information present in paper documents cannot be transferred seamlessly to digital media and digital services are not easily accessible from the paper world.

In this seminar talk I will present an information-centric approach for integrating paper with digital as well as physical media based on a general cross-media information platform (iServer). Some details about the architecture and implementation of the iServer platform as well as the underlying RSL metamodel for cross-media linking will be highlighted. A selection of interactive paper applications that have been developed based on this platform over the past few years will be presented, including the EdFest interactive paper guide for the Edinburgh festivals and the PaperPoint tool for paper-driven PowerPoint presentations. Challenges and solutions for novel forms of interactive paper and cross-media publishing are discussed based on the presented applications.

The second part of my talk will address future directions for research on interactive paper and cross-media information management. This includes specific extensions of the iServer platform and RSL model as well as the application of our solution in new domains such as digital libraries, cross-media annotation and retrieval or personal cross-media information management that goes beyond the hierarchical information management imposed by the desktop metaphor."

This dataset (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4744379) contains fingerprint information of WLAN ac... more This dataset (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4744379) contains fingerprint information of WLAN access points and BLE beacons with a known position and IMU sensor data. Data was collected on the floor of the Web and Information Systems Engineering (WISE) Lab at the VUB (Pleinlaan 9, 3rd floor) with 110 training reference points and 30 test data points. Each reference point was recorded for 20 seconds in four different orientations. In this README document we go in depth into how the data was collected and the structure of the dataset.

This lecture forms part of the 'Next Generation User Interfaces' course given at the Vrije Univer... more This lecture forms part of the 'Next Generation User Interfaces' course given at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

This lecture forms part of the 'Web Technologies' course given at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

This lecture forms part of the 'Human-Computer Interaction' course given at the Vrije Universitei... more This lecture forms part of the 'Human-Computer Interaction' course given at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Our goal is to prepare students for the future challenges in managing and analysing the rapidly g... more Our goal is to prepare students for the future challenges in managing and analysing the rapidly growing amounts of data that is produced manually by humans as well as automatically generated by, for example, sensors in emerging Internet of Things solutions, data capturing on the Web or as an outcome of scientific experiments. Thereby, we focus on the scientific aspects and concepts for scalable data management solutions, information retrieval and data mining as well as different information visualisation and interaction techniques rather than on existing mainstream technologies, and provide students the necessary education for a future career as data scientists and data engineers.

"While there have been dramatic increases in the use of digital technologies for information stor... more "While there have been dramatic increases in the use of digital technologies for information storage, processing and delivery over the last twenty years, the affordances of paper have ensured its retention as a key information medium. Despite predictions of the paperless office, paper is ever more present in our daily work as reflected by the continuously increasing worldwide paper consumption.

Many researchers have argued for the retention of paper as an information resource and its integration into cross-media environments as opposed to its replacement. This has resulted in a wide variety of projects and technological developments for digitally augmented paper documents over the past decade. However, the majority of the realised projects focus on technical advances in terms of hardware but pay less attention to the very fundamental information integration and cross-media information management issues.

Our information-centric approach for a tight integration of paper and digital information is based on extending an object-oriented database management system with functionality for cross-media information management. The resulting iServer platform introduces fundamental link concepts at an abstract level. The iServer’s core link management functionality is available across different multimedia resources. Only the media-specific portion of these general concepts, for example the specification of a link’s source anchor, has to be implemented in the form of a plug-in to support new resource types. This resource plug-in mechanism results in a flexible and extensible system where new types of digital as well as physical resources can easily be integrated and, more importantly, cross-linked to the growing set of supported multimedia resources. In addition to the associative linking of information, our solution allows for the integration of semantic metadata and supports multiple classification of information units. iServer can, not only link between various static information entities, but also link to active content and this has proven to be very effective in enabling more complex interaction design.

As part of the European project Paper++, under the Disappearing Computer Programme, an iServer plug-in for interactive paper has been implemented to fully integrate paper and digital media, thereby gaining the best of the physical and the digital worlds. It not only supports linking from physical paper to digital information, but also enables links from digital content to physical paper or even paper to paper links. This multi-mode user interface results in highly interactive systems where users can easily switch back and forth between paper and digital information. The definition of an abstract input device interface further provides flexibility for supporting emerging technologies for paper link definition in addition to the hardware solutions for paper link definition and activation that were developed within the Paper++ project.

We introduce different approaches for cross-media information authoring where information is either compiled by established publishers with an expertise in a specific domain or by individuals who produce their own cross-media information environments. Preauthored information can be combined with personally aggregated information. A distributed peer-to-peer version of the iServer platform supports collaborative authoring and the sharing of link knowledge within a community of users.

The associations between different types of resources as well as other application-specific information can be visualised on different output channels. Universal access to the iServer’s information space is granted using the eXtensible Information Management Architecture (XIMA), our publishing platform for multi-channel access.

Our fundamental concepts for interactive paper and cross-media information management have been designed independently of particular hardware solutions and modes of interaction which enables the iServer platform to easily adapt to both new technologies and applications. Finally, the information infrastructure that we have developed has great potential as an experimental platform for the investigation of emerging multimedia resources in general and interactive paper with its possible applications in particular."

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/as-we-may-interact-challenges-and-opportunities-for-next-generation-human-information-interaction.pdf

Blue Sky paper presentation at Hypertext 2021, Online, 2021

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/back-to-the-future-bringing-original-hypermedia-and-cross-media-concepts-to-modern-desktop-environments.pdf

Keynote at RCIS 2019, Brussels, Belgium, 2019

The efficient management and retrieval of information has been investigated since the early days ... more The efficient management and retrieval of information has been investigated since the early days of Vannevar Bush's seminal article 'As We May Think' introducing the Memex. However, nowadays information is fragmented across different media types, devices as well as digital and physical environments and we are often struggling to find information. In this keynote I will discuss three main issues to be addressed when developing solutions for managing information in these co-called cross-media information spaces. We first have a look at an extensible cross-media linking solution based on the RSL (resource-selector-link) hypermedia metamodel where information can be integrated across applications, devices as well as digital and physical information environments. I will then outline some of the limitations of existing digital document formats which are often just a simulation of paper documents and their affordances on desktop computers, and discuss more flexible document representations for cross-media information spaces. Further, new forms of human-information interaction and cross-media user interfaces, including some recent work on dynamic data physicalisation, are introduced. Various research artefacts such as the EdFest interactive paper prototype, the PimVis solution for personal cross-media information management or the MindXpres platform for next generation presentation solutions will be used to illustrate different aspects of the presented data-centric approach for cross-media information spaces and architectures. Last but not least, I will provide an outlook on how the embedding of the presented concepts at the level of an operating system might ultimately lead to new possibilities for cross-media information management and innovative forms of human-information interaction.

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/towards-cross-media-information-spaces-and-architectures.pdf

Presentation given at DocEng 2018, 18th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, Halifax, Canada, 2018

Documents do often not exist in isolation but are implicitly or explicitly linked to parts of oth... more Documents do often not exist in isolation but are implicitly or explicitly linked to parts of other documents. However, due to a multitude of proprietary document formats with rather simple link models, today's possibilities for creating hyperlinks between snippets of information in different document formats are limited. In previous work, we have presented a dynamically extensible cross-document link service overcoming the limitations of the simple link models supported by most existing document formats. Based on a plug-in mechanism, our link service enables the linking across different document types. In this paper, we assess the extensibility of our link service by integrating some document formats as well as third-party document viewers. We illustrate the flexibility of creating advanced hyperlinks across these document formats and viewers that cannot be realised with existing linking solutions or link models of existing document formats. A user study further investigates the user experience when creating and navigating cross-document hyperlinks.

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/cross-media-document-linking-and-navigation.pdf

Presentation given at IPIN 2021, 11th International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation, Lloret de Mar, Spain, 2021

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/indoor-positioning-using-the-openhps-framework.pdf

Presentation given at ER 2010, 29th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, Vancouver, Canada, 2010

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/what-is-wrong-with-digital-documents-a-conceptual-model-for-structural-cross-media-content-composition-and-reuse.pdf

Presentation given at International Workshop Toward a Design Language for Data Physicalization, Berlin, Germany, 2018

Advanced data visualisation techniques enable the exploration and analysis of large datasets. Rec... more Advanced data visualisation techniques enable the exploration and analysis of large datasets. Recently, there is the emerging field of data physicalisation, where data is represented in physical space (e.g. via physical models) and can no longer only be explored visually, but also by making use of other senses such as touch. Most existing data physicalisation solutions are static and cannot be dynamically updated based on a user’s interaction. Our goal is to develop a framework for new forms of dynamic data physicalisation in order to support an interactive exploration and analysis of datasets. Based on a study of the design space for dynamic data physicalisation, we are therefore working on a grammar for representing the fundamental physical operations and interactions that can be applied to the underlying data. Our envisioned extensible data physicalisation framework will enable the rapid prototyping of dynamic data physicalisations and thereby support researchers who want to experiment with new combinations of physical variables or output devices for dynamic data physicalisation as well as designers and application developers who are interested in the development of innovative dynamic data physicalisation solutions.

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/towards-a-framework-for-dynamic-data-physicalisation.pdf

Presentation given at JCDL 2018, ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Fort Worth, USA, 2018

Physical and digital documents do often not exist in isolation but are implicitly or explicitly l... more Physical and digital documents do often not exist in isolation but are implicitly or explicitly linked. Previous research in Human-Computer Interaction and Personal Information Management has revealed certain user behaviour in associating information across physical and digital documents. Nevertheless, there is a lack of empirical studies on user needs and behaviour when defining these associations. In this paper, we address this lack of empirical studies and provide insights into strategies that users apply when associating information across physical and digital documents. In addition, our study reveals the limitations of current practices and we suggest improvements for associating information across documents. Last but not least, we identify a set of design implications for the development of future cross-document linking solutions.

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/an-analysis-of-cross-document-linking-mechanisms.pdf

Presentation given at AVI 2018, International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, Grosseto, Italy, 2018

Nowadays, digital and paper documents are used simultaneously during daily tasks. While significa... more Nowadays, digital and paper documents are used simultaneously during daily tasks. While significant research has been carried out to support the re-finding of digital documents, less effort has been made to provide similar functionality for paper documents. In this paper, we present a solution that enables the design of cross-media Personal Information Management (PIM) user interfaces helping users in re-finding documents across digital and physical information spaces. We propose three main design requirements for the presented cross-media PIM user interfaces. Further, we illustrate how these design requirements have been applied in the development of three proof-of-concept applications and describe a software framework supporting the design of these interfaces. Finally, we discuss opportunities for future improvements of the presented cross-media PIM user interfaces.

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/crossing-spaces-towards-cross-media-personal-information-management-user-interfaces.pdf

Presentation given at AVI 2018, International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, Grosseto, Italy, 2018

Audio recordings and the corresponding transcripts are often used as prosthetic memory (PM) after... more Audio recordings and the corresponding transcripts are often used as prosthetic memory (PM) after meetings and lectures. While current research is mainly developing novel features for prosthetic memory, less is known on how and why audio recordings and transcripts are used. We investigate how users interact with audio and transcripts as prosthetic memory, whether interaction strategies change over time, and analyse potential differences in accuracy and efficiency. In contrast to the subjective user perception, our results show that audio recordings and transcripts are equally efficient, but that transcripts are generally preferred due to their easily accessible contextual information. We further identified that prosthetic memory is not only used as a recall aid but frequently also consulted for verifying information that has been recalled from organic memory (OM). Our findings are summarised in a number of design implications for prosthetic memory solutions.

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/designing-prosthetic-memory-audio-or-transcript-that-is-the-question.pdf

Presentation at CSEDU 2022, Online, 2022

The learning of new knowledge and skills often requires previous knowledge, which can lead to som... more The learning of new knowledge and skills often requires previous knowledge, which can lead to some frustration if a teacher does not know a learner's exact knowledge and skills and therefore confronts them with exercises that are too difficult to solve. We present a solution to address this issue when teaching techniques and skills in the domain of table tennis, based on the concrete needs of trainers that we have investigated in a survey. We present a conceptual model for the representation of knowledge graphs as well as the level at which individual players already master parts of this knowledge graph. Our fine-grained model enables the automatic suggestion of optimal exercises in a player's so-called zone of proximal development, and our domain-specific application allows table tennis trainers to schedule their training sessions and exercises based on this rich information. In an initial evaluation of the resulting solution for personalised learning environments, we received positive and promising feedback from trainers. We are currently investigating how our approach and conceptual model can be generalised to some more traditional educational settings and how the personalised learning environment might be further improved based on the expressive concepts of the presented model.

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/personalised-learning-environments-based-on-knowledge-graphs-and-the-zone-of-proximal-development.pdf

Presentation given at ICDAR 2007, 9th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, Curitiba, Brazil, 2007

With the emergence of digital pen and paper interfaces, there is a need for gesture recognition t... more With the emergence of digital pen and paper interfaces, there is a need for gesture recognition tools for digital pen input. While there exists a variety of gesture recognition frameworks, none of them addresses the issues of supporting application developers as well as the designers of new recognition algorithms and, at the same time, can be integrated with new forms of input devices such as digital pens. We introduce iGesture, a Java-based gesture recognition framework focusing on extensibility and cross-application reusability by providing an integrated solution that includes tools for gesture recognition as well as the creation and management of gesture sets for the evaluation and optimisation of new or existing gesture recognition algorithms. In addition to traditional screen-based interaction, iGesture provides a digital pen and paper interface.

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/igesture-a-general-gesture-recognition-framework.pdf

Presentation given at EICS 2017, 9th ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems, Lisbon, Portugal, 2017

Context awareness plays an important role in recent smart environments and embedded interactions.... more Context awareness plays an important role in recent smart environments and embedded interactions. In order to increase user satisfaction and acceptance, these context-aware solutions should be controllable by end users. Over the last few years we have therefore seen an emerging trend towards visual programming tools for context-aware applications based on simple "IF this THEN that" rules. However, existing solutions often do not support the simple reuse of the "this" part in order to define more sophisticated rules. Given that the desired level of control varies among individuals, we propose a unified multi-layered context modelling approach distinguishing between end users, expert users and programmers. Our Context Modelling Toolkit (CMT) consists of the necessary context modelling concepts and offers a rule-based context processing engine. We further illustrate how end users and expert users might interact with the CMT framework. Finally, we highlight some advantages of our Context Modelling Toolkit by discussing a number of use cases.

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/the-context-modelling-toolkit-a-unified-multi-layered-context-modelling-approach.pdf

Presentation given at PaperComp 2010, 1st International Workshop on Paper Computing, Copenhagen Denmark, 2010

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/interactive-paper-past-present-and-future.pdf

Presentation given at EICS 2016, 8th ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems, Brussels, Belgium, 2016

Despite major advancements in digital document management, paper documents still play an importan... more Despite major advancements in digital document management, paper documents still play an important role in our daily work and are often used in combination with digital documents and services. Over the last two decades, we have seen a number of augmented reality solutions helping users in managing their paper documents in office settings. However, since data is mainly managed at the application layer, the use of multiple document tracking setups results in fragmented and inconsistent tracking data. Furthermore, existing tracking solutions often focus on the tracking of paper documents in organisational structures such as folders or filing cabinets without taking into account the flow of documents across these organisational structures. We present the Document Tracking (DocTr) framework for unifying existing document tracking setups and managing document metadata across organisational structures. The DocTr framework has been implemented based on a user-centric requirements analysis and simplifies the development of interactive computing systems for personal cross-media information management.

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/doctr-a-unifying-framework-for-tracking-physical-documents-and-organisational-structures.pdf

Presentation given at DUI 2016, 5th Workshop on Distributed User Interfaces, Lugano, Switzerland, 2016

Over the last decade we have seen various research on distributed user interfaces (DUIs). We prov... more Over the last decade we have seen various research on distributed user interfaces (DUIs). We provide an overview of existing DUI approaches and classify the different solutions based on the granularity of the distributed UI components, location constraints as well as their support for the distribution of state. We propose an approach for user-defined cross-device interaction where users can author their customised user interfaces based on a hypermedia metamodel and the concept of active components. Furthermore, we discuss the configuration and sharing of customised distributed user interfaces by end users where the focus is on an authoring rather than programming approach.

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/towards-user-defined-cross-device-interaction.pdf

Presentation given at AVI 2016, International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, Bari, Italy, 2016

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/pimvis-exploring-and-refinding-documents-in-cross-media-information-spaces.pdf

Presentation given at SERVE 2016, International Workshop on Smart Ecosystems cReation by Visual dEsign, Bari, Italy, 2016

Context awareness plays an important role in smart environments and embedded interactions. In ord... more Context awareness plays an important role in smart environments and embedded interactions. In order to increase user satisfaction and acceptance, context-aware solutions should be controllable by end users. Over the last few years we have therefore witnessed an emerging trend of visual programming tools for context-aware applications based on simple "if this then that" rules. Unfortunately, existing solutions do not support the easy reuse of the "this" part in other rules. Further, the desired level of control varies among individuals. In order to let users choose the right level of automation and control, we propose a multi-layered context modelling approach distinguishing between end users, expert users and programmers. We report on our ongoing development of the Context Modelling Toolkit (CMT) consisting of the necessary context modelling concepts as well as a rule-based context processing engine. We further discuss an initial design of the graphical user interface for the presented multi-layered context modelling approach.

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/a-multi-layered-context-modelling-approach-for-end-users-expert-users-and-programmers.pdf

Presentation given at ER 2014, 33rd International Conference on Conceptual Modelling, Atlanta, USA, 2014

Information fragmentation is a well-known issue in personal information management (PIM). In orde... more Information fragmentation is a well-known issue in personal information management (PIM). In order to overcome this problem, various PIM solutions have focussed on linking documents via semantic relationships. More recently, task-centered information management (TIM) has been introduced as an alternative PIM paradigm. While these two paradigms have their strengths and weaknesses, we aim for a new PIM system design approach to achieve better synergies with human memory. We further envision a cross-media solution where physical information is integrated with a user's digital personal information space. We present the Object-Concept-Context (OC2) conceptual framework for context-aware personal cross-media information management combining the best of the two existing PIM paradigms and integrating the most relevant features of the human memory. Further, we outline how the OC2 framework has been implemented based on a domain-specific application of the Resource-Selector-Link (RSL) hypermedia metamodel.

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/towards-a-conceptual-framework-and-metamodel-for-context-aware-personal-cross-media-information-management-systems.pdf

Presentation given at WISE 2014, 15th International Conference on Web Information System Engineering, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2014

Digital documents often do not exist in isolation but are implicitly or explicitly linked to part... more Digital documents often do not exist in isolation but are implicitly or explicitly linked to parts of other documents. Nevertheless,most existing document formats only support links to web resources but not to parts of third-party documents. An open cross-document link service should address the multitude of existing document formats and be extensible to support emerging document formats and models. We present an architecture and prototype of an open cross-document link service and browser that is based on the RSL hypermedia metamodel. A main contribution is the specification and development of a visual plug-in solution that enables the integration of new document formats without requiring changes to the cross-document browser’s main user interface component. The presented visual plug-in mechanism makes use of the Open Service Gateway initiative (OSGi) specification for modularisation and plug-in extensibility and has been validated by developing data as well as visual plug-ins for a number of existing document formats.

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/open-cross-document-linking-and-browsing-based-on-a-visual-plug-in-architecture.pdf

Demo of our MindXpres presentation platform. More details about the presented system can be found... more Demo of our MindXpres presentation platform. More details about the presented system can be found on mindxpres.com

This video demonstrates our Kinect-based solution for controlling the visual augmentation of a li... more This video demonstrates our Kinect-based solution for controlling the visual augmentation of a live music performance via explicit gestures and implicit dance moves. Since the visual augmentation is not scripted, the presented approach enables more dynamic and spontaneous performances and leads to a more intense interaction between artist and audience.

Our solution for the expressive control of indirect augmented reality during live music performances has been used multiple times in live concerts by a well-known Belgium band.

More details about the presented system can be found in our paper entitled 'Expressive Control of Indirect Augmented Reality During Live Music Performances' which has been presented at the 13th International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression taking place in Seoul, Korea Republic: http://www.academia.edu/3408497/Expressive_Control_of_Indirect_Augmented_Reality_During_Live_Music_Performances

Our demonstration is a paper-based interactive guide for visitors to the world's largest internat... more Our demonstration is a paper-based interactive guide for visitors to the world's largest international arts festival that was developed as part of a project investigating new forms of context-aware information delivery and interaction in mobile environments. Information stored in a database is accessed from a set of interactive paper documents, including a printed festival brochure, a city map and a bookmark. Active areas are defined within the documents and selection of these using a special digital pen causes the corresponding query request along with context data to be sent to a festival application database and the response is returned to the visitor in the form of generated speech output. In addition to paper-based information browsing and transactions such as ticket booking, the digital pen can also be applied for data capture of event ratings and handwritten comments on events. The system integrates three main database components - a cross-media link server, a content management framework for multi-channel context-aware publishing of data and the festival application database.

Global Information Systems Group, GlobIS, ETH Zurich
Moira C. Norrie, Beat Signer, Nadir Weibel, Michael Grossniklaus, Rudi Belotti, Corsin Decurtins

More details about the presented system can be found in our paper entitled 'Context-Aware Platform for Mobile Data Management' which has been presented in the journal Wireless Networks (WINET), 13(6): https://www.academia.edu/175422/Context-Aware_Platform_for_Mobile_Data_Management

Citations form the basis for a web of scientific publications. Search engines, embedded hyperlink... more Citations form the basis for a web of scientific publications. Search engines, embedded hyperlinks and digital libraries all simplify the task of finding publications of interest on the web and navigating to cited publications or web sites. However the actual reading of publications often takes place on paper and frequently on the move. We present a system Print-n-Link that uses technologies for interactive paper to enhance the reading process by enabling users to access digital information and/or searches for cited documents from a printed version of a publication using a digital pen for interaction. A special virtual printer driver automatically generates links from paper to digital services during the printing process based on an analysis of PDF documents. Depending on the user setting and interaction gesture, the system may retrieve metadata about the citation and inform the user through an audio channel or directly display the cited document on the users screen.

Global Information Systems Group, GlobIS, ETH Zurich
Moira C. Norrie, Beat Signer, Nadir Weibel

More details about the presented system can be found in our paper entitled 'Print-n-Link: Weaving the Paper Web' which has been presented at the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering taking place in Amsterdam, The Netherlands: https://www.academia.edu/175445/Print-n-Link_Weaving_the_Paper_Web

The Lost Cosmonaut is an interactive narrative based on digitally enhanced paper. This technology... more The Lost Cosmonaut is an interactive narrative based on digitally enhanced paper. This technology uses an electronic pen to mediate between paper and computer. Thus any actions of the pen on the paper can be captured and manipulated by a computer as well as we can map digitally controlled events onto paper. The story in this narrative environment reveals itself partially through written text and images on the paper surface just as any other printed story. However, additional information in form of digitally controlled outputs such as sound, light and projections can be accessed through interaction with pen and paper. Furthermore the audience is not only supposed to read and otherwise perceive information, we also want them to actively produce content for this environment by writing onto the paper. By doing so they also add content to the database containing the digital output at the same time. Hence we produce a complex multimedia environment that works on three levels: On paper, in a digitally controlled visual and acoustic environment and in the combination of both worlds. Last but not least this environment is an open system, which grows as a collaborative effort over time as each user adds his own entries to paper and database. We argue that using paper as an integrated part of a digital environment is a best-of-both-world approach that opens up new possibilities for producing and perceiving narrative.

Global Information Systems, GlobIS, ETH Zurich
Moira C. Norrie, Beat Signer, Nadir Weibel, Rudi Belotti, Axel Vogelsang

More details about the presented system can be found in our paper entitled 'The Lost Cosmonaut: An Interactive Narrative Environment on Basis of Digitally Enhanced Paper' which has been presented at the International Conference on Virtual Storytelling 2005 taking place in Strasbourg, France: https://www.academia.edu/175448/The_Lost_Cosmonaut_An_Interactive_Narrative_Environment_on_Basis_of_Digitally_Enhanced_Paper

An interactive art installation was realised as part of the 150 year jubilee of ETH Zurich and pr... more An interactive art installation was realised as part of the 150 year jubilee of ETH Zurich and presented to a wide public for two and a half weeks in the Welten des Wissens exhibition at Platzspitz Zurich. The Generosa Enterprise installation provides information about Monte Generoso, a mountain located in the southern part of Switzerland. The visitors of the exhibition are taken along a journey where they can experience the world of Monte Generoso combining art, science and interactive paper technology.

Global Information Systems Group, ETH Zurich
Beat Signer, Moira C. Norrie, Nadir Weibel, Curt Walter Tannhäuser

More details about the interactive paper framework that has been used in realising the Generosa Enterprise project can be found in our paper entitled 'General Framework for the Rapid Development of Interactive Paper Applications' which has been presented at the 1st International Workshop on Collaborating over Paper and Digital Documents taking place in Banff, Canada: https://www.academia.edu/175444/General_Framework_for_the_Rapid_Development_of_Interactive_Paper_Applications

PaperProof is a paper-digital proof-editing application that allows users to edit digital documen... more PaperProof is a paper-digital proof-editing application that allows users to edit digital documents based on gesture-based markup of printed versions. It interprets the pen strokes made by the users on paper and can automatically execute the intended editing operations in the digital source document.

PaperProof operations may be executed either in real-time to support users reviewing documents at their workplace or at a later time if the user is currently on the move and does not have ready access to a digital version of the document. This enables users to switch seamlessly back and forth between paper and digital instances of a document throughout the document lifecycle working with whichever medium is preferred for a given task.

Global Information Systems, GlobIS, ETH Zurich
Nadir Weibel, Adriana Ispas, Moira C. Norrie, Beat Signer

More details about the presented system can be found in our paper entitled 'PaperProof: A Paper-Digital Proof-Editing System' which has been presented at the 26th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Interactivity Track) taking place in Florence, Italy: https://www.academia.edu/175420/PaperProof_A_Paper-Digital_Proof-Editing_System

Based on the iPaper (Interactive Paper) framework, we have developed an Interactive Tabletop. The... more Based on the iPaper (Interactive Paper) framework, we have developed an Interactive Tabletop. The surface of a table has been augmented with Anoto pattern and a desk-mounted projector is used for the tabletop projection. This video shows the pen-based control of three different applications including the GoogleEarth browser, a photo album and a drawing tool. Basically any third-party application can be controlled by using the presented iTable solution.

Global Information Systems, GlobIS, ETH Zurich
Beat Signer, Matthias Geel, Nadir Weibel, Moira C. Norrie

More details about the interactive paper framework that has been used in realising the iTable can be found in our paper entitled 'General Framework for the Rapid Development of Interactive Paper Applications' which has been presented at the 1st International Workshop on Collaborating over Paper and Digital Documents taking place in Banff, Canada: https://www.academia.edu/175444/General_Framework_for_the_Rapid_Development_of_Interactive_Paper_Applications