Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
bile settings where only a digital pen and paper is used. Novel generations of digital
pens which include a display can overcome this limitation. Moreover, we have ex-
amined how shared handwritten annotations of many users can be visualized in an
integrated manner and proposed a novel visualization that leverages a dynamic scal-
ing approach for integrating annotations of all users in one single view. As shown
by the results of a user study, this is particularly supportive for gaining an overview
on shared annotations.
Relations between the user and documents/tools.
CoScribe unifies the interac-
tion with physical and digital artifacts. Regardless whether a document or a tool
is available in printed form or visualized on a display, the same digital pen can be
used to interact with it. As a consequence, the user does not have to switch between
different input devices. One can even perform interactions that span paper and dis-
plays, for example linking a Web page with a printed document using one single pen
gesture. This tight coupling is in contrast with most other paper-based applications
and it outperforms augmented desk systems, which restrict the interaction to a small
digitally augmented region.
Relations between multiple documents.
Through its ecological perspective, Co-
Scribe focuses on the relations that exist between multiple documents of a document
collection. We have presented novel interaction techniques that allow the user to ex-
press these relations in order to integrate and structure collections of documents.
The first technique provides for creating, following and sharing hyperlinks be-
tween any combination of printed and digital documents. In contrast to previous
work on cross-media hyperlinks, our technique supports the wide range of docu-
ment types which is typical for information ecologies. This includes various for-
mats of digital documents, their printed versions, Web pages and physical books.
The technique puts strong emphasis on the associative character of hyperlinks, as a
bidirectional hyperlink is created by an associative pen gesture that connects both
link anchors. Links can be followed by tapping with the same pen on a link hot-spot
either on paper, in the CoScribe viewer or in the Web browser. Finally, we have
presented a collaborative ecological view that visualizes the relations within collec-
tions of documents. It provides a high-level overview on all hyperlinks and tags and
provides a structured access to the documents of the collection. A user study has
shown that hyperlinks between printed documents and Web pages lead to a signif-
icantly higher performance in information integration tasks with hybrid document
collections than traditional references.
Moreover, we have contributed three novel techniques that offer support for
structuring document collections with (predefined or freely-chosen) tags. The fourth
technique tackles the question of how temporal processes can be tagged by collabo-
rating users with tangible objects. The richness of the interaction techniques, which
are based on our interaction model, becomes particularly noticeable here. The first
technique leverages tangible stickers for tagging pages of physical documents. As
we have seen, this is intuitive, provides full visual feedback on paper and affords
quick access to a document page not only using a computer but also using the printed
document instance. However, the tags are rather course-grained, since they always
apply to entire pages. The second technique, which offers very flexible scopes, uses
