Creativity Support Tools (CSTs) have grown exponentially in the HCI field. However, this growth has always leaned towards divergent thinking, thus neglecting convergent thinking. We confirm this information based on a preliminary review between 2012 and 2022 in the ACM Digital Library. Our findings confirm that researchers and practitioners have been primarily interested in developing tools to support idea generation, minimizing studies on evaluating and selecting ideas. We focused our research on four major points: i) the domain of the tool, ii) the type of system and interface developed in the tools, iii) the methodology used, and iv) the creative context of the tools. Based on this information, we contribute six guidelines to support the improvement of existing CSTs and the development of new CSTs.

Betting on new and promising ideas is fundamental for innovation in various sectors, helping the world that faces so many adversities. To increase these ideas, the stages of evaluation and selection of ideas in the creative processes need to be improved and not neglected. To minimize this problem and contribute to the scientific advance in the creativity-oriented HCI, we present a tool for selecting ideas used after brainstorming sessions. Our prototype is inspired by the conclusions of an observational study that we conducted with six students in a classroom, in which the students' objective was to plan the making of a video for a social institution that helps the neediest people.

Digital video technologies have been changing dramatically in the field of media production but reduced the tangibility of working with film. One interesting approach to get back such tangibility in digital systems is using pen and touch interactions. Pen and touch interactions presented in tablet computers are natural and efficient. Pen additional data, like pressure and tilt, can be used for novel interactions. However, most of the previous research that combines pen and touch inputs discards such additional inputs and limits the interactions to Cartesian coordinates and is applied to data visualization or static media contexts. In this work, we have implemented a prototype running on a tablet that aims to facilitate video browsing through the combination of pinch gestures and pen tilt. It aims to provide more natural and tangible interactions to control dynamic media and, at the same time, promote novel interactions using familiar inputs.

Several interaction methods for smart glasses have been studied, but it is not clear which method could be the best to interact with augmented objects. In this study, an Augmented Reality (AR) marker-based application for smart glasses was developed, implementing three different interaction methods for marker selection: one using mid-air hand gestures, other using head movements and double-tap in the glasses, and the last one using a handheld controller. We studied the users' interaction times, preferences, and their willingness to perform the interaction method in public. We find that users' felt more comfortable using a familiar handheld controller. However, the solution with the smart glass's tap function and head movement got results close to the results of smart glass's controller.

While ordinary touchscreen-based interfaces on urban explorer applications draw much of a user's attention onto the screen, visual and audio-haptic augmented reality interfaces have emerged as the two main streams for enabling direct focus on the surroundings. However, neither interface alone satisfies users in the highly dynamic urban environment. This research investigates how the two complementary augmentation can coexist on one system and how people adapt to the situation by selecting the more suitable interface. A prototype was deployed in a field experiment in which participants explored points of interest in an urban environment with both interfaces. The engagement with the surroundings was compared with a touchscreen-based application. Most participants spontaneously switched between the two interfaces, which manifests the value of the availability of both interfaces on one system. The results point at the situated advantages of either interface and reveal the users' preferences when both interfaces are available.

Tablet computers provide a natural support for digital annotation associated to any type of media, including live video. However, annotations of live video require real-time motion tracking, maintaining the association between annotations and moving objects, as well as interfaces that facilitate the annotation task of a live event. This work presents the initial users' feedback on a video annotator that includes two real-time trackers, Kinect and TLD, and on two annotation methods that aim to help annotating live video, "Hold and Overlay" and "Hold and Speed Up".

Surface computing allows flexible search interaction where users can manipulate the representation of entities recommended for them to create new queries or augment existing queries by taking advantage of increased screen estate and almost physical tactile interaction. We demonstrate a search system based on 1) Direct Manipulation of Entity Representation on Surfaces and 2) Entity Recommendation and Document Retrieval. Entities are modeled as a knowledge-graph and the relevances of entities are computed using the graph structure. Users can manipulate the representation of entities via spatial grouping and assigning preferences on entities. Our contribution can help to design effective information exploration systems that take advantage of large surfaces.

Collaborative idea generation leverages social interactions and knowledge sharing to spark diverse associations and produce creative ideas. Information exploration systems expand the current context by suggesting novel but related concepts. In this paper we introduce InspirationWall, an unobtrusive display that leverages speech recognition and information exploration to enhance an ongoing idea generation session with automatically retrieved concepts that relate to the conversation. We evaluated the system in six idea generation sessions of 20 minutes with small groups of two people. Preliminary results suggest that InspirationWall contrasts the decay of idea productivity over time and can thus represent an effective way to enhance idea generation activities.

Exploratory search confront users with challenges in expressing search intents as the current search interfaces require investigating result listings to identify search directions, iterative typing, and reformulating queries. We present the design of Exploration Wall, a touch-based search user interface that allows incremental exploration and sense-making of large information spaces by combining entity search, flexible use of result entities as query parameters, and spatial configuration of search streams that are visualized for interaction. Entities can be flexibly reused to modify and create new search streams, and manipulated to inspect their relationships with other entities. Data comprising of task-based experiments comparing Exploration Wall with conventional search user interface indicate that Exploration Wall achieves significantly improved recall for exploratory search tasks while preserving precision. Subjective feedback supports our design choices and indicates improved user satisfaction and engagement. Our findings can help to design user interfaces that can effectively support exploratory search on touch devices.

The user's understanding of information needs and the information available in the data collection can evolve during an exploratory search session. Search systems tailored for well-defined narrow search tasks may be suboptimal for exploratory search where the user can sequentially refine the expressions of her information needs and explore alternative search directions. A major challenge for exploratory search systems design is how to support such behavior and expose the user to relevant yet novel information that can be difficult to discover by using conventional query formulation techniques. We introduce IntentStreams, a system for exploratory search that provides interactive query refinement mechanisms and parallel visualization of search streams. The system models each search stream via an intent model allowing rapid user feedback. The user interface allows swift initiation of alternative and parallel search streams by direct manipulation that does not require typing. A study with 13 participants shows that IntentStreams provides better support for branching behavior compared to a conventional search system.

This paper discusses the evaluation of a video annotator that supports multimodal annotation and is applied to contemporary dance as a creation tool. The Creation-Tool was conceived and designed to assist the creative processes of choreographers and dance performers, functioning as a digital notebook for personal annotations. The prototype, developed for Tablet PCs, allows video annotation in real-time, using a live video stream, or postevent, using a pre-recorded video stream. The tool also allows different video annotation modalities, such as annotation marks, text, audio, ink strokes and hyperlinks. In addition, the system enables different modes of annotation and video visualization. The development followed an iterative design process involving two choreographers, and a usability study was carried out, involving international dance performers participating in a contemporary dance "residence - workshop".

When using a tablet computer, sketching is a natural approach for users to annotate video scenes. However, when these annotations are done in real-time and overlaid in the video, their context can be lost due to changes in the scene being annotated. We propose an approach towards maintaining the annotations' context, by using object tracking to create anchors onto which further annotations can be attached. To this end, the annotator is capable of using different tracking methods, including a Kinect sensor and/or the TLD object tracking algorithm.

This paper presents a video annotator that supports multimodal annotation and is applied to contemporary dance as a creation tool. The Creation-Tool was conceived and designed to assist the creative processes of choreographers, working as a digital notebook for personal annotations. The prototype, developed for Tablet PCs, is a real-time multimodal video annotator based on keyboard, pen and voice inputs. In addition, a remote control for mobile devices was added to the system. Two types of annotations were defined: annotation marks and regular annotations. The annotations marks are defined by a keyword and an icon, in contrast to regular annotations that do not have a pre-defined structure. Motion tracking defines the dynamic behavior of the annotations and voice input complements the other modalities.

This paper describes the current status of the VideoStore project. This project has the goal of developing a Web based system to store, transmit, search, and share the contents of courses captured in video. The current version includes a stable version of the architecture, and a set of advanced interfaces. The application synchronizes video streaming and slideshow presentations, and currently it provides several video based interfaces, and a video annotation system. The paper describes the system features, the architecture and the interfaces developed.