multitouch kiosk

Develop a multitouch kiosk application for browsing through a curated collection of faceted information.

Multitouch screens are soon going to be as common as flat screen monitors are today. Interacting with a screen simultaneously using multiple fingers breaks most assumptions that commonly hold true for common mouse based human-computer interaction. You will have the opportunity to tackle problems of the next generation user interfaces. We need to understand how this new modality of interaction can help build more natural interactions. This project investigates this new modality in the context of information browsing. Presentation of information is part art, part science. The visual generated by an application fundamentally changes the users perception and interpretation of the presented information. The multitouch kiosk provides you with a space to experiment with different visualizations of information for the selected domain.

This project develops a kiosk style interactive application for browsing information. Examples of such applications are a restaurant finder, a Jukebox, a library kiosk or an information kiosk at a museum. Your group will explore and analyze issues of developing multitouch applications and browsing through faceted information. You will identify a domain of interest and build the required semantics to extract, store and visually represent information for that domain. Using this curated library of information, the application will allow a user to browse, query, filter and collect information of interest to them through the modality of multitouch.

provided materials
  • Multitouch enabled display (19" multitouch display)
  • Ecologylab Semantics library for information representation, extraction and display.
  • Prefuse visualization toolkit.
required readings
recommended reading
references
videos
project-specific deliverables
  • What task or activity will the users perform with the kiosk application ? Describe a scenario in which a user interacts with your application. Highlight how the unique features will support the user in performing their task. Use multiple scenarios, if necessary, to focus on each unique feature.
  • Select information sources (websites) for the selected domain. What are the specific information fields and semantics (relationships between fields) that are critical for the user's task ? How will these relationships be presented visually to the user ? For example, an album field for each song denotes a group of songs. This grouping could be presented as a folder, in a tree or as a list.