Ubiquitous nature, versatility, and durability enabled paper to maintain its importance in the digital age. It is not surprising there have been numerous attempts to combine paper with the digital content. One way to do so is to place paper on a horizontal interactive display (e.g. tabletop or tablet). The paper thus becomes "the screen" on which the digital content is viewed, yet it also acts as a barrier that degrades the quality of the perceived image. This research tries to address this problem by proposing and evaluating a novel paper display concept called Dynamic pinhole paper. The concept is based on perforating the paper (to decrease its opacity) and moving digital content beneath the perforated area (to increase the resolution). To evaluate this novel concept, we fabricated the pinhole paper and implemented the software in order to run multiple user studies exploring the concept’s viability, optimal movement trajectory (amount, direction and velocity), and the effect of perforation on printing, writing and reading. The results show that the movement of digital content is a highly effective strategy for improving the resolution of the digital content through perforation where the optimal velocity is independent from trajectory direction (e.g. horizontal or circular) and amount of movement. Results also show the concept is viable on of the shelf hardware and that it is possible to write and print on perforated paper.

Despite the drive to digitise learning, paper still holds a prominent role within educational settings. While computational devices have several advantages over paper (e.g. changing and showing content based on user interaction and needs) their prolonged or incorrect usage can hinder educational achievements. In this paper, we combine the interactivity of computational devices with paper whilst reducing the usage of technology to the minimum. To this end, we developed and evaluated a novel back-print illumination paper display called LightMeUp where different information printed on the back side of the paper becomes visible when paper is placed on an interactive display and back-illuminated with a particular colour. To develop this novel display, we first built a display simulator that enables the simulation of various spectral characteristics of the elements used in the system (i.e. light sources such as tablet computers, paper types and printing inks). By using our simulator, we designed various use-case prototypes that demonstrate the capabilities and feasibility of the proposed system. With our simulator and use-cases presented, educators and educational content designers can easily design multi-stable interactive visuals by using readily available paper, printers and touch displays.

Virtual Reality (VR) has the potential to support mobile knowledge workers by complementing traditional input devices with a large three-dimensional output space and spatial input. Previous research on supporting VR knowledge work explored domains such as text entry using physical keyboards and spreadsheet interaction using combined pen and touch input. Inspired by such work, this paper probes the VR design space for authoring presentations in mobile settings. We propose PoVRPoint-a set of tools coupling pen- and touch-based editing of presentations on mobile devices, such as tablets, with the interaction capabilities afforded by VR. We study the utility of extended display space to, for example, assist users in identifying target slides, supporting spatial manipulation of objects on a slide, creating animations, and facilitating arrangements of multiple, possibly occluded shapes or objects. Among other things, our results indicate that 1) the wide field of view afforded by VR results in significantly faster target slide identification times compared to a tablet-only interface for visually salient targets; and 2) the three-dimensional view in VR enables significantly faster object reordering in the presence of occlusion compared to two baseline interfaces. A user study further confirmed that the interaction techniques were found to be usable and enjoyable.

Digital-augmentation of print-media can provide contextually relevant audio, visual, or haptic content to supplement the static text and images. The design of such augmentation--its medium, quantity, frequency, content, and access technique--can have a significant impact on the reading experience. In the worst case, such as where children are learning to read, the print medium can become a proxy for accessing digital content only, and the textual content is avoided. In this work, we examine how augmented content can change the reader's behaviour with a comic book. We first report on the usage of a commercially available augmented comic for children, providing evidence that a third of all readers converted to simply viewing the digital media when printed content is duplicated. Second, we explore the design space for digital content augmentation in print media. Third, we report a user study with 136 children that examined the impact of both content length and presentation in a digitally-augmented comic book. From this, we report a series of design guidelines to assist designers and editors in the development of digitally-augmented print media.