Title of Our Presentation : A "Whole News World": Using a Physical Interface to Navigate International News Sites
Abstract/Intro
A "Whole News World": Using a Physical Interface to Navigate International News Sites
The "Whole News World Table" presents international news from local newspapers through a physical world map interface. Using a puck-shaped object, users select any country in the world and a representative online news sources (in English) is displayed on a lightbox in front of them. In other words, the table is a geographically navigated database of international news sites. Our mission is to increase the user's awareness of global current events from an international perspecitve. Most people only read news from their country's news services about domestic issues or the few "hotspot" areas of the world. Our table, however, emphasizes the fact that even if we do not usually come across news from other areas of the world, things are happening there that have global impact. We envision the table being used in libraries, schools, or other public places; anywhere someone might pass by it, stop for a few moments, and find out a bit of news.
In our presentation, we are going to review the research leading up to our idea, key design decision, a technical overview of the table, the potential for future developments, and conclude with a demonstration.
We started out with the idea of designing an "interactive table." Researching this field, we learned more about both tables in general and the interactive sort. We observed people at tables, photographed them and experimented ourselves with field trips to places such as dim sum, a sushi boat restaurant and a milkshake counter. Through online research, we learned about a variety of interactive tables such as MERL's DiamondSpin, Sony's InfoTable and Stanford's own iTable. The conclusion of this research and benchmarking was learning about how people use tables and what they use them for.
Object Tracking Research to mention:
Wacom tablet: pen tablets and pens: The SenseTable (MIT)
eBeam and Mimio: ultrasonic position capture
LeapFrog and Zowie Intertainment: kid toys that do object tracking
MetaDesk (MIT): infared cameras to recognize objects, rear projectionscreen
RFID: didn't use because couldn't get. Would put ID's in table and have the object be the reciever
InfoTable: video camera ("DeskSat")