Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

Digiscope - Collaborative Interaction with Complex Data and Computation (2011-2020) http://digiscope.fr . “Equipment of Excellence” project funded by the “Invesissements d'Avenir” program of the French government. 10 academic partners: FCS Paris-Saclay (coordinator), Université Paris-Sud, CNRS, CEA, Inria, Institut Telecom ParisTech, Ecole Centrale Paris, Université Versailles - Saint-Quentin, ENS Cachan, Maison de la Simulation. Overall budget: 22.5 Meuros, including 6.7 Meuros public funding from ANR. Michel Beaudouin-Lafon: coordinator and principal investigator for the whole project.

The goal of Digiscope is to create nine high-end interactive rooms interconnected by high-speed networks and audio-video facilities to study remote collaboration across interactive visualization environments. The equipment will be open to outside users and targets four main application areas: scientific discovery, product lifetime management, decision support for crisis management, and education and training. In Situ contributes the existing WILD room, a second room called WILDER funded by the project, and its expertise in the design and evaluation of advanced interaction techniques and the development of distributed software architectures for interactive systems.

MDGest - Interacting with Multi-Dimensional Gestures (2011-2014). InSitu is the only academic partner. Funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR), Programme JCJC (Junior researchers): 88 Keuros. Caroline Appert (coordinator) and Theophanis Tsandilas.

This project investigates new interactions for small devices equipped with a touchscreen. Complementing the standard point-and-click interaction paradigm, the MDGest project explores an alternative way of interacting with a user interface: tracing gestures with the finger. According to previous work, this form of interaction has several benefits, as it is faster and more natural for certain contexts of use. The originality of the approach lies in considering new gesture characteristics (dimensions) to avoid complex shapes that can be hard for users to memorize and activate. Dimensions of interest include drawing speed (local or global), movement direction, device orientation or inclination, and distinctive drawing patterns in a movement.

DRAO – Adrien Bousseau (Inria, Sophia Antipolis) submitted a successful ANR grant with InSitu members Theophanis Tsandilas and Wendy Mackay, and Prof. Maneesh Agrawala (Berkeley).

The goal of the project is to create interactive graphics tools to support sketching. The kickoff meeting was held in Nov. 2012 and included interviews with designers from Toyota.