Section: Software

jBricks

Participants : Stéphane Huot, Emmanuel Pietriga [correspondant] , Mathieu Nancel, Romain Primet.

jBricks (Figure 1 ) is a Java toolkit that integrates a high-quality 2D graphics rendering engine based on ZVTM (section 5.2 ) and a versatile input configuration module (based on ICon  [45] and FlowStates  5.4 ) into a coherent framework, enabling the exploratory prototyping of interaction techniques and rapid development of post-WIMP applications running on cluster-driven interactive visualization platforms such as wall-sized displays. The goal of this framework is to ease the development, testing and debugging of interactive visualization applications. It also offers an environment for the rapid prototyping of novel interaction techniques and their evaluation through controlled experiments.

Figure 1. jBricks applications running on the WILD platform (32 tiles for a total resolution of 20 480 × 6 400 pixels). (a) Zoomed-in visualization of the North-American part of the world-wide air traffic network (1 200 airports, 5 700 connections) overlaid on NASA’s Blue Marble Next Generation images (86 400 × 43 200 pixels) augmented with country borders ESRI shapefiles. (b) Panning and zooming in Spitzer’s Infrared Milky Way (396 032 × 12 000 pixels). (c) Controlled laboratory experiment for the evaluation of mid-air multi-scale navigation techniques.

• ACM: H.5.2 [User Interfaces]: Graphical user interfaces (GUI)

• Software benefit: See E. Pietriga, S. Huot, M. Nancel, R. Primet, Rapid Development of User Interfaces on Cluster-Driven Wall Displays with jBricks, EICS '11: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGCHI symposium on Engineering interactive computing systems, pages 185-190, June 2011

• OS/Middleware: Java (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows)

• Required library or software: several, managed through Maven

• Programming language: Java