introduction Share on Introduction to the special issue on UIDL for next-generation user interfaces Editors: Orit Shaer Wellesley College Wellesley CollegeView Profile , Robert J. K. Jacob Tufts University Tufts UniversityView Profile , Mark Green University of Ontario Institute of Technology University of Ontario Institute of TechnologyView Profile , Kris Luyten Hasselt University Hasselt UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 16Issue 4Article No.: 16pp 1–3https://doi.org/10.1145/1614390.1614391Published:27 November 2009Publication History 8citation870DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations8Total Downloads870Last 12 Months3Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Abstract The production of 3D user interfaces is complicated by the wide range of input and output devices used in 3D applications and the lack of software tools for their production. A 3D user interface that works well with one particular set of input and output devices could fail when another set of devices is used. To solve this problem the Grappl system automatically generates 3D user interfaces at run time. This paper presents the programmer interface to Grappl and some of the techniques used in its implementation. An important part of this process is placing user interface and application objects in 3D space. This is achieved by using policy techniques to automate the layout process. This paper presents some of the features and techniques that have been used in policy implementation, including relative position policy and grouping policy, with a few example applications. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Two of the main problems facing the developers of 3D user interface are the wide range of device configurations that must be supported and the lack of software tools for constructing 3D user interfaces. The Grappl project aims to solve these problems by producing user interfaces that adapt to the device configurations that they encounter at runtime. Since the user interface is constructed at runtime one of the problems confronted by Grappl is laying out the different user interface components and possibly some of the application objects. This paper presents a framework for automating the layout of 3D user interfaces, including the types of information provided by the user interface designer, the high level architecture of the layout system and the algorithms used for empty space management.

In modern urban areas, we often find a transportation network that follows a superimposed pattern. In this paper, we propose a novel method to generate a virtual traffic network based on (1) image-derived templates, and (2) a rule-based generating system. Using 2D images as input maps, various road maps with different patterns could be produced. This traffic network generating model adjusts itself intelligently in order to avoid restricted geographical areas or urban developments. The generative model follows closely directions of elevation and connects road ends in ways that allow various types of breakpoints.

CAVE/sup TM/ displays offer many advantages over other virtual reality (VR) displays, including a large, unencumbered viewing space. Unfortunately, the typical tracking subsystems used with CAVE/sup TM/ displays tether the user and lessen this advantage. We have designed a simple, low-cost foot tracker that is wireless, leaving the user free to move. The tracker can be assembled for less than $200 US, and achieves an accuracy of /spl plusmn/10 cm at a 20-Hz sampling rate. We have tested the prototype with two applications: a visualization supporting close visual inspection, and a walkthrough of the campus. Although the tracking was convincing, it was clear that the tracker's limitations make it less than ideal for applications requiring precise visual inspection. However the freedom of motion allowed by the tracker was a compelling supplement to our campus walkthrough, allowing users to stroll and look around corners.

The availability of high-performance 3D workstations has increased the range of application for interactive real-time animation. In these applications the user can directly interact with the objects in the animation and direct the evolution of their motion, rather than simply watching a pre-computed animation sequence. Interactive real-time animation has fast-growing applications in virtual reality, scientific visualization, medical training and distant learning. Traditional approaches to computer animation have been based on the animator having complete control over all aspects of the motion. In interactive animation the user can interact with any of the objects, which changes the current motion path or behaviour in real time. The objects in the animation must be capable of reacting to the user's actions and not simply replay a canned motion sequence. This paper presents a framework for interactive animation that allows the animator to specify the reactions of objects to events generated by other objects and the user. This framework is based on the concept of relations that describe how an object reacts to the influence of a dynamic environment. Each relation specifies one motion primitive triggered by either its enabling condition or the state of the environment. A collection of the relations is structured through several hierarchical layers to produce responsive behaviours and their variations. This framework is illustrated by several room-based dancing examples that are modelled by relations. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We present a dynamic measure to capture temporal image distortions, such as popping artifacts, resulting from algorithms performing real-time rendering tasks. Experimental results show that it can form the basis for evaluating and comparing the algorithms' temporal image quality.

Although there are many adaptive (or view-dependent) multi-resolution methods developed, support for progressive transmission and reconstruction has not been addressed. A major reason for this is that most of these methods require large portion of the hierarchical data structure to be available at the client before rendering starts, due to the neighboring dependency constraints. In this paper, we present an efficient multi-resolution method that allows progressive and selective transmission of multi-resolution models. This is achieved by reducing the neighboring dependency to a minimum. The new method allows visually important parts of an object to be transmitted to the client at higher priority than the less important parts and progressively reconstructed there for display. We will present the new method and discuss how it works in a client-server environment. We will also show the data structure of the transmission record and some performance results of the method.

Article Free Access Share on On caching and prefetching of virtual objects in distributed virtual environments Authors: Jimmy H. P. Chim Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong KongView Profile , Mark Green Department of Computer Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2H1, Canada Department of Computer Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2H1, CanadaView Profile , Rynson W. H. Lau Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Hong KongView Profile , Hong Va Leong Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Hong KongView Profile , Antonio Si Sun Microsystems, 901 San Antonio Road, Palo Alto, CA Sun Microsystems, 901 San Antonio Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile Authors Info & Claims MULTIMEDIA '98: Proceedings of the sixth ACM international conference on MultimediaSeptember 1998 Pages 171–180https://doi.org/10.1145/290747.290769Published:01 September 1998Publication History 51citation594DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations51Total Downloads594Last 12 Months27Last 6 weeks3 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Distributed virtual environments allow users at different geographical locations to share and interact within a common virtual environment via a local network or through the Internet. To deliver a good performance for such applications, we need to address several issues in different research disciplines. First, we must be able to model virtual objects effectively. The recently developed multi-resolution techniques for object modeling are of great value here, since they are capable of simplifying the object models and therefore reducing the time to render them. This may greatly reduce the demand for rendering performance on the client machines. Second, with the constraint of the limited bandwidth of the Internet, we need to reduce the response time by reducing the amount of data requested over the network. Caching of suitable object models of high affinity will reduce the amount of data requested over the network for a faster response time. Prefetching object models by predicting those ...

There is no doubt that 3D interfaces edged 2D ones in 3D modeling applications. 2D input devices cannot provide 3D information directly and are less efficient. Direct manipulation, which is highly desirable in 3D modeling, is also impossible. This paper describes the design and implementation of a virtual hand interface for a 3D modeler, which can be used to creating VRML worlds. The virtual hand interface allows direct 3D interaction of objects. Users can grab, move or resize the object easily with their hands in a more natural and intuitive way. A fuzzy logic posture recognition system is incorporated with the modeler to accept posture commands. Fuzzy logic is applied to cope with imprecise data stored in the sample posutre database and the ones to be recognized in real-time. A posture database editor is developed for managing the sample posture database, whose functions include posture insertion, deletion, testing and viewing the records in the posture database. The 3D virtual worl...

We describe a framework for a performance evaluation system for real-time rendering algorithms in Virtual Reality. The system embeds a numeric method to evaluate image quality and approaches to construct different types of VR tasks to conduct fair tests of real-time rendering algorithms. We test a real-time rendering algorithm with this framework. Experimental results show that the system supports broad tests of real-time rendering algorithms, and can form the basis for comparing their performance. Keywords: real-time rendering algorithms, virtual reality, performance evaluation 1 Introduction Given enough CPU-time, current computer graphics technologies can render very complex scenes and produce nearly photo-realistic pictures. However, for interactive computer graphics, such as virtual reality applications, data management and programming decisions have to be made in trading off rendering quality for interactive update rates. This has been called the real-time rendering problem. I...

Non‐uniform rational B‐splines (NURBS) has been widely accepted as a standard tool for geometry representation and design. Its rich geometric properties allow it to represent both analytic shapes and free‐form curves and surfaces precisely. Moreover, a set of tools is available for shape modification or more implicitly, object deformation. Existing NURBS rendering methods include de Boor algorithm, Oslo algorithm, Shantz’s adaptive forward differencing algorithm and Silbermann’s high speed implementation of NURBS. However, these methods consider only speeding up the rendering process of individual frames. Recently, Kumar et al. proposed an incremental method for rendering NURBS surfaces, but it is still limited to static surfaces. In real‐time applications such as virtual reality, interactive display is needed. If a virtual environment contains a lot of deforming objects, these methods cannot provide a good solution. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for interactive rendering of deformable objects by maintaining a polygon model of each deforming NURBS surface and adaptively refining the resolution of the polygon model. We also look at how this method may be applied to multi‐resolution modelling.

The rendering and animation of complex scenes containing many objects represented by large numbers of display primitives requires time proportional to the total number of primitives in the scene. To improve the performance of a given graphics engine, multi-resolution modeling techniques are usually used to reduce the total number of primitives required to be rendered. However, existing techniques are usually slow and some of them may not even preserve the topology of the object geometry faithfully. In this paper, we present an efficient and simple algorithm to generate an object model of the desired resolution given a high resolution model of an object and the distance of the object from the view point. The major advantages of the new method are that it preserves the topology of the given model, it can be used to generate multi-resolution models on the fly and in real-time, and its performance is predictable. The last advantage makes it well fit into the framework that we proposed m our work on real-time rendering in virtual reality[1].

This paper describes a Computer Aided Design system for sketching free-form polygonal surfaces such as terrains and other natural objects. The user manipulates two 3D position and orientation trackers with three buttons, one for each hand. Each hand has a distinct role to play, with the dominant hand being responsible for picking and manipulation, and the less-dominant hand being responsible for context setting of various kinds. The less-dominant hand holds the workpiece, sets which refinement level that can be picked by the dominant hand, and generally acts as a counterpoint to the dominant hand. In this paper, the architecture of the system is outlined, and a simple surface is shown.

The Virtual Reality (VR) user interface style allows natural hand and body motions to manipulate virtual objects in 3D envu-onments using one or more 3D input devices.This style is best suited to application areas where traditional two-dimensional styles fall short, such as scientific visualization, architectural visualization, and remote manipulation.Currently, the programming effort required to produce a VR application is too large, and many pitfalls must be avoided in the creation of successful VR programs.In this article we describe the Decoupled Simulation Model reality

The Virtual Reality user interface style allows the user to manipulate virtual objects in a 3D environment using 3D input devices. This style is best suited to application areas where traditional two dimensional styles fall short, but the current programming effort required to produce a VR application is somewhat large. We have built a toolkit called MR, which facilitates the development of VR applications. The toolkit provides support for distributed computing, head-mounted displays, room geometry, performance monitoring, hand input devices, and sound feedback. In this paper, the architecture of the toolkit is outlined, the programmer's view is described, and two simple applications are described.

The Polhemus Isotrak is often used as an orientation and position tracking device in virtual reality environments. When it is used to dynamically determine the user's viewpoint and line of sight ( e.g. in the case of a head mounted display) the noise and delay in its measurement data causes temporal-spatial distortion, perceived by the user as jittering of images and lag between head movement and visual feedback. To tackle this problem, we first examined the major cause of the distortion, and found that the lag felt by the user is mainly due to the delay in orientation data, and the jittering of images is caused mostly by the noise in position data. Based on these observations, a predictive Kalman filter was designed to compensate for the delay in orientation data, and an anisotropic low pass filter was devised to reduce the noise in position data. The effectiveness and limitations of both approaches were then studied, and the results shown to be satisfactory. 1 Introduction In recen...

The primary goal of the UofA* UIMS is to address a key problem with UIMSS: their inability to help in the initial design of user interfaces, Because of this inability, most existing UIMSS require the interface designer to work with low level syntactic and lexical detail, which can be very time-consuming and expensive in terms of effort required.The UofA* approach to this problem is to produce the initial design specification and implementation of the user interface automatically y, and then enable the interface designer to improve its appearance and effectiveness through an interactive refinement process, The interface designer, in this approach, works at the conceptual and semantic levels of the user interface and produces a high-level description of the commands the interface is to support.Based on this description the syntactic and lexical levels of the interface are automatically designed and implemented.This interface can be refined by the designer to improve the resulting interaction with the user.The UofA* UIMS facilitates exploration in interface design by using user's preferences and designer's guidelines as optional inputs.It allows the creation of interfaces in which many different types of syntaxes can coexist.

A computational model and system for the generation of distributed applications in a workstation environment are presented. The well-known RPC model is modified by a novel concept known as template attachment. A computation consists of a network of sequential procedures which have been encapsulated in templates. A small selection of templates is available from which a distributed application with the desired communication behavior can be rapidly built. The system generates all the required low-level code for correct synchronization, communication, and scheduling. This results in a system that is easy to use and flexible and can provide a programmer with the desired amount of control in using idle processing power over a network of workstations. The practical feasibility of the model has been demonstrated by implementing it for Unix-based workstation environments.>

A high-level UIMS which automatically generates the lexical and syntactic design of graphical user interfaces is presented. The interfaces generated by the UIMS can easily and rapidly be refined by the designer by using highly interactive and graphical facilities. The UIMS accepts a high-level description of the semantic commands supported by the application, a description of the implementation device, and optionally, the end user's preferences. Based on these inputs the UIMS generates graphical user interfaces in which the commands are selected from menus and command arguments are provided through interaction with graphical interaction techniques.

The UofA* User Interface Management System (UIMS) generates graphical user interfaces based on a high-level description of semantic commands supported by the application. A main part of the UIMS, called Chisel, generates the presentation component of interfaces. Chisel selects interaction techniques, determines their attributes, and places them on the screen of the display device. While doing so it is capable of considering device properties, end user's preferences, and interface designer's guidelines. The aim of this paper is to discuss in detail the design and implementation of Chisel.

The concepts of a user interface management system (UIMS) and user interface designer have become well known in the user interface and graphics community. Most UIMSs developed so far have concentrated on the efficiency of generating the user interface; the user interface designer's interface has received relatively little attention. We identify the important features of the user interface designer's interface. A UIMS incorporating these features in its interface has been developed, and is described in this paper.

The subject of User Interface Management Systems (UIMS) has been a topic of research and debate for the last several years. The goal of such systems has been to automate the production of user interface software. The problem of building quality user interfaces within available resources is a very important one as the demand for new interactive programs grows. Prototype UIMSs have been built and some software packages are presently being marketed as such. Many papers have been published on the topic.