Combining the power of online crowdsourcing with creative writing user interfaces

The goal of this work was to provide professional and amateur writers with a new way of enhancing their productivity and mental well-being, by helping them overcoming writers block and being able to achieve a state of optimal experience while writing. Our approach is based on bringing together different components to create what we call a creative moment. A creative moment is composed by an image, a text, a mood, a location and a color. The color presented in the creative moment varied according to the mood that was associated to the creative moment. With the creative moments we hoped that our users could have a way to easily trigger their creativity and have a kick start in their work. The prototyping of a web crowdsourcing platform, named CreativeWall, and a Microsoft Word Add-In, that was used on the user study performed, is described and their implementations are discussed. The user study reveals that our approach does have a positive influence in the productivity of the participants when compared with another existing approach. The study also revealed that our approach can ease the process of achieving a state of optimal experience by enhancing one of the dimensions presented on the Flow Theory. At the end we present what we consider would be some possible future developments for the concept created during the development of this work.

tCAD: a 3D modeling application on a depth enhanced tabletop computer

Tabletop computers featuring multi-touch input and object tracking are a common platform for research on Tangible User Interfaces (also known as Tangible Interaction). However, such systems are confined to sensing activity on the tabletop surface, disregarding the rich and relatively unexplored interaction canvas above the tabletop. This dissertation contributes with tCAD, a 3D modeling tool combining fiducial marker tracking, finger tracking and depth sensing in a single system. This dissertation presents the technical details of how these features were integrated, attesting to its viability through the design, development and early evaluation of the tCAD application. A key aspect of this work is a description of the interaction techniques enabled by merging tracked objects with direct user input on and above a table surface.

Graphical constraints: a graphical user interface for constraint problems

A constraint satisfaction problem is a classical artificial intelligence paradigm characterized by a set of variables (each variable with an associated domain of possible values), and a set of constraints that specify relations among subsets of these variables. Solutions are assignments of values to all variables that satisfy all the constraints. Many real world problems may be modelled by means of constraints. The range of problems that can use this representation is very diverse and embraces areas like resource allocation, scheduling, timetabling or vehicle routing. Constraint programming is a form of declarative programming in the sense that instead of specifying a sequence of steps to execute, it relies on properties of the solutions to be found, which are explicitly defined by constraints. The idea of constraint programming is to solve problems by stating constraints which must be satisfied by the solutions. Constraint programming is based on specialized constraint solvers that take advantage of constraints to search for solutions. The success and popularity of complex problem solving tools can be greatly enhanced by the availability of friendly user interfaces. User interfaces cover two fundamental areas: receiving information from the user and communicating it to the system; and getting information from the system and deliver it to the user. Despite its potential impact, adequate user interfaces are uncommon in constraint programming in general. The main goal of this project is to develop a graphical user interface that allows to, intuitively, represent constraint satisfaction problems. The idea is to visually represent the variables of the problem, their domains and the problem constraints and enable the user to interact with an adequate constraint solver to process the constraints and compute the solutions. Moreover, the graphical interface should be capable of configure the solver’s parameters and present solutions in an appealing interactive way. As a proof of concept, the developed application – GraphicalConstraints – focus on continuous constraint programming, which deals with real valued variables and numerical constraints (equations and inequalities). RealPaver, a state-of-the-art solver in continuous domains, was used in the application. The graphical interface supports all stages of constraint processing, from the design of the constraint network to the presentation of the end feasible space solutions as 2D or 3D boxes.

A multimodal tablet-based interface for designing and reviewing 3D engineering models

The ability to view and interact with 3D models has been happening for a long time. However, vision-based 3D modeling has only seen limited success in applications, as it faces many technical challenges. Hand-held mobile devices have changed the way we interact with virtual reality environments. Their high mobility and technical features, such as inertial sensors, cameras and fast processors, are especially attractive for advancing the state of the art in virtual reality systems. Also, their ubiquity and fast Internet connection open a path to distributed and collaborative development. However, such path has not been fully explored in many domains. VR systems for real world engineering contexts are still difficult to use, especially when geographically dispersed engineering teams need to collaboratively visualize and review 3D CAD models. Another challenge is the ability to rendering these environments at the required interactive rates and with high fidelity. In this document it is presented a virtual reality system mobile for visualization, navigation and reviewing large scale 3D CAD models, held under the CEDAR (Collaborative Engineering Design and Review) project. It’s focused on interaction using different navigation modes. The system uses the mobile device's inertial sensors and camera to allow users to navigate through large scale models. IT professionals, architects, civil engineers and oil industry experts were involved in a qualitative assessment of the CEDAR system, in the form of direct user interaction with the prototypes and audio-recorded interviews about the prototypes. The lessons learned are valuable and are presented on this document. Subsequently it was prepared a quantitative study on the different navigation modes to analyze the best mode to use it in a given situation.