Section: New Results

Engineering of interactive systems

Participants : Caroline Appert, Michel Beaudouin-Lafon [correspondant] , Olivier Chapuis, Cédric Fleury, Stéphane Huot, Theophanis Tsandilas, Wendy Mackay.

InSitu has a long tradition of developing software tools and user interface toolkits to facilitate the creation of interactive systems. These tools allow us to better experiment with our ideas and are therefore an integral part of our research methodology. Most of them are freely available and some are used outside InSitu for research or teaching.

Interactive Paper – We created PaperComposer [31] , a graphical interface builder for creating personal interactive-paper applications for musical creation. We also built an API that facilitates the development of interactive paper components for PaperComposer. The API enables developers to define new paper components that accept additional musical data with their own representation structures and interactions.

3D Telepresence – In the context of 3D telepresence, we studied how to transmit a 3D model of the users to a remote location. In [17] we present a 3D head reconstruction method for low cost 3D telepresence systems that uses only a single consumer level hybrid sensor (color+depth) located in front of the users. Our method fuses the real-time, noisy and incomplete output of a hybrid sensor with a set of static, high-resolution textured models acquired in a calibration phase (figure 9 ). A complete and fully textured 3D model of the users’ head can thus be reconstructed in real-time, accurately preserving the facial expression of the user. The main features of our method are a mesh interpolation and a fusion of a static and a dynamic textures to combine respectively a better resolution and the dynamic features of the face.

Wall-sized displays – We developed Smarties [16] , a system that allows developers to easily add interactive support to their wall-sized display applications by using mobile devices such as tablets. The system includes an original mobile interface that can be customized by the application itself (without programming the mobile device), a communication protocol between the mobile devices and the application running on the wall-sized display, and libraries in different programming languages that implement the protocol and handle synchronization, locking and input conflicts. Synchronization between multiple mobile devices is handled by the libraries, and thus the system supports free collaboration. The mobile devices come with multiple cursor controllers, also associated with keyboards, widgets and clipboards.