Beat Signer

Qi Xu, Beat Signer

Scholarly reading often involves engaging with various supplementary materials beyond PDFs to support understanding. In practice, scholars frequently incorporate such external materials into their reading workflow through annotation. However, most existing PDF annotation tools support only a limited range of media types for embedding annotations in PDF documents. This paper investigates cross-media annotation as a design space for augmenting academic reading. We present a design exploration of a cross-media annotation tool that allows scholars to easily link PDF content with other documents and materials such as audio, video or web pages. The proposed design has the potential to enrich reading practices and enable scholars to guide and support other researchers' reading experiences.

Maxim Van de Wynckel, Beat Signer

Positioning systems and frameworks use various techniques to determine the position of an object. Some of the existing solutions combine different sensory data at the time of positioning in order to compute more accurate positions by reducing the error introduced by the used individual positioning techniques. We present OpenHPS, a generic hybrid positioning system implemented in TypeScript, that can not only reduce the error during tracking by fusing different sensory data based on different algorithms, but also also make use of combined tracking techniques when calibrating or training the system. In addition to a detailed discussion of the architecture, features and implementation of the extensible open source OpenHPS framework, we illustrate the use of our solution in a demonstrator application fusing different positioning techniques. While OpenHPS offers a number of positioning techniques, future extensions might integrate new positioning methods or algorithms and support additional levels of abstraction including symbolic locations.

Beat Signer, Timothy J. Curtin

The last two decades have seen the emergence and steady development of tangible user interfaces. While most of these interfaces are applied for input - with output still on traditional computer screens - the goal of programmable matter and actuated shape-changing materials is to directly use the physical objects for visual or tangible feedback. Advances in material sciences and flexible display technologies are investigated to enable such reconfigurable physical objects. While existing solutions aim for making physical objects more controllable via the digital world, we propose an approach where holograms (virtual objects) in a mixed reality environment are augmented with physical variables such as shape, texture or temperature. As such, the support for mobility forms an important contribution of the proposed solution since it enables users to freely move within and across environments. Furthermore, our augmented virtual objects can co-exist in a single environment with programmable matter and other actuated shape-changing solutions. The future potential of the proposed approach is illustrated in two usage scenarios and we hope that the presentation of our work in progress on a novel way to realise tangible holograms will foster some lively discussions in the CHI community.