Sylvain Malacria

Katherine Fennedy, Sylvain Malacria, Hyowon Lee et al.

Touch-based devices, despite their mainstream availability, do not support a unified and efficient command selection mechanism, available on every platform and application. We advocate that hotkeys, conventionally used as a shortcut mechanism on desktop computers, could be generalized as a command selection mechanism for touch-based devices, even for keyboard-less applications. In this paper, we investigate the performance and usage of soft keyboard shortcuts or hotkeys (abbreviated SoftCuts) through two studies comparing different input methods across sitting, standing and walking conditions. Our results suggest that SoftCuts not only are appreciated by participants but also support rapid command selection with different devices and hand configurations. We also did not find evidence that walking deters their performance when using the Once input method.

Sylvain Malacria, Thomas Pietrzak, Aurélien Tabard et al.

We present U-Note, an augmented teaching and learning system leveraging the advantages of paper while letting teachers and pupils benefit from the richness that digital media can bring to a lecture. U-Note provides automatic linking between the notes of the pupils' notebooks and various events that occurred during the class (such as opening digital documents, changing slides, writing text on an interactive whiteboard...). Pupils can thus explore their notes in conjunction with the digital documents that were presented by the teacher during the lesson. Additionally, they can also listen to what the teacher was saying when a given note was written. Finally, they can add their own comments and documents to their notebooks to extend their lecture notes. We interviewed teachers and deployed questionnaires to identify both teachers and pupils' habits: most of the teachers use (or would like to use) digital documents in their lectures but have problems in sharing these resources with their pupils. The results of this study also show that paper remains the primary medium used for knowledge keeping, sharing and editing by the pupils. Based on these observations, we designed U-Note, which is built on three modules. U-Teach captures the context of the class: audio recordings, the whiteboard contents, together with the web pages, videos and slideshows displayed during the lesson. U-Study binds pupils' paper notes (taken with an Anoto digital pen) with the data coming from U-Teach and lets pupils access the class materials at home, through their notebooks. U-Move lets pupils browse lecture materials on their smartphone when they are not in front of a computer.