Cluster of Excellence PoL – New Starting Grant Project

In March 2020, a new “Starting Grant Project” was launched as part of the Cluster of Excellence Physics of Life (PoL) for the immersive exploration of multiscale biological data. The Cluster of Excellence PoL aims to discover new paradigms for understanding life and deepen our knowledge of living biological matter. This serves the purpose of gaining insights into the “laws of physics” that underlie the dynamic spatio-temporal organization of life into molecules, cells and tissues. Fundamental physics is used to understand and solve biological questions. Therefore, innovative experimental approaches, theoretical predictions and computer simulations will be used.

Raimund Dachselt represents the research area “Scientific Computing and Systems Microscopy” (RA5) of the cluster as one of the principal investigators. With the beginning of March 2020, our first PoL employee will also start working. We welcome Eva Goebel as a new PhD student to our Interactive Media Lab!

TimeBOMB wins at Visionale and mb21

The game station TimeBOMB, which was developed by the students Severin Engert, Remke Albrecht, Felix Meyer, and Constantin Amend during practical course work, has won first prize at the Visionale in Leipzig, Germany. Additonally, TimeBOMB was also awarded a prize at the Deutschen Multimediapreis mb21. The station enables four players to compete with each other playing the classic game Bomberman in four different time periods. It was originally developed as an exhibition piece for the 50th anniversary of computer science in Dresden. Furthermore, it was part of the exhibition “Schöne neue Cyberwelt?” in the Technische Sammlungen Dresden. TimeBOMB also grabbed the attention of the media. The online magazine Tag24, the MDR, Oiger, and Dresdener Neuste Nachrichten all reported about TimeBOMB. The Laudatio of the mb21 is also worth seeing.

More information can be found on the project page about TimeBOMB.

ISS’19 in Deajeon, South Korea

The 2019 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces took place from November 10 to 13 in Deajeon, South Korea. Many international researchers presented interesting publications from all areas of human computer interaction. The Interactive Media Lab was present with our paper DesignAR: Immersive 3D-Modeling Combining Augmented Reality with Interactive Displays.
We are very happy to announce that the authors Patrick Reipschläger and Raimund Dachselt won the best paper award for academic publications. For more information, please have a look at DesignAR’s project page.

IEEE VIS 2019 in Vancouver

This year, the IEEE VIS Conference took place in Vancouver, Canada. 20-25 October, scientists and practitioners from all over the world presented the newest research in the area of visualization. Of course the Interactive Media Lab was present as well. Tamara Flemisch, Ricardo Langner, Tom Horak and Wolfgang Büschel from our lab attended the conference. While Tamara and Tom served as Student Volunteers, Wolfgang gave a talk about our CG&A article Augmented Reality Graph Visualizations: Investigation of Visual Styles in 3D Node-Link Diagrams on Wednesday. More information, the paper PDF and the presentation slides can be found on the project page. Ulrik Günther and Aryaman Gupta of the CSBD/MPI-CBG were also there and presented a poster from the Cluster of Excellence Physics of Life and a short paper.

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UIST 2019 in New Orleans

BodyHub, UIST 2019

From October 20 to October 23, the 32st ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (short UIST 2019) took place at the center of New Orleans in the French Quarter. The doctoral symposium and welcome reception happened at the Royal Sonesta Hotel on the famous Bourbon Street on Sunday. UIST brings together people from diverse areas including graphical & web interfaces, tangible & ubiquitous computing, virtual & augmented reality, novel devices, and CSCW.

This year, Andreas Peetz and Konstantin Klamka presented a reconfigurable wearable system for clothing, called BodyHub, that allows user to realize their own smart garment applications by arranging and configuring exchangeable functional modules. To address individual user requirements and preferences, BodyHub provides input and output modules that can be placed freely onto slide-in sockets which are imprinted in the textile by using 3D printing. Further, our approach facilitates the creation of user-defined system functions without any programming skills by providing a easy-to-use smartphone companion app. BodyHub thereby allows the creation of personalized wearable solutions by the users themselves and also supports ad-hoc assemblies for interface design explorations in research labs. Detailed information about our approach can be found in the poster paper and the project page.

Some impressions of the scientific part and non-scientific program can be found in the twitter feed of the conference @acmuist and acmuist flickr.

Ulrike Kister receives Dr.-Walter-Seipp award for her dissertation

Ulrike Kister, former member and PhD student at the Interactive Media Lab Dresden, received the prestigious Dr.-Walter-Seipp award of the TU Dresden and the Commerzbank Endowment on October 11th. The award was presented for her outstanding dissertation Interactive Visualization Lenses.

Graphical data visualizations allow to visually understand numbers comprehensible and correlations. For complex data, magic lenses can help to highlight and analyse certain aspects. In order to investigate novel interaction forms for magic lenses, Ulrike Kister developed a rich set of spatially-aware techniques that enable intuitive human-computer interactions. Therefore, she explores, for instance, how a smartphone or even the own body can function as a magic lens in front of large display walls. We congratulate her on this admirable work and achievement. You can find some impressions of the event in our photo gallery.

The prizes sponsored by Commerzbank were presented by the Rector of the TU Dresden, Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. DEng/Auckland Hans Müller-Steinhagen and Commerzbank AG Chairman of the Board Burkhard von der Osten. Furthermore, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Raimund Dachselt gave a laudation for Ulrike. In addition, Dr. Sara Al-Nassir and Dr. Martin Schwarze also received awards for their dissertations.

MobileHCI 2019 in Taipei

MobileHCI 2019

From October 1 to 4, the ACM MobileHCI 2019 conference took place in Taipei, Taiwan. IMLD’s Wolfgang Büschel presented our work on Smartphone-based Pan and Zoom in AR. More information about this project, the paper download as well as the presentation slides can be found at the project page.

IMLD Presents Full-Paper at HCI International 2019

The 21st International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction took place from July 26 to 31 in Orlando, Florida. The location of the venue was the Walt Disney World Dolphin Resorts. The conference was well attended with over 5000 participants and over 1200 papers were presented.

The Interactive Media Lab Dresden presented CHARM: Cord-based Haptic Augmented Reality Interaction. In this work, we developed a cord-based controller for manipulating content in Augmented Reality. We created a generic radial menu for system control, as well as interaction concepts for the 3D transformation of AR objects. Furthermore, we also conducted a study with our fully-implemented hard- and software prototype

Dagstuhl Seminar on Mobile Data Visualization

From July 14 to 19, we participated in the Mobile Data Visualization seminar at Schloss Dagstuhl. As a follow up of our CHI 2018 workshop, this interdisciplinary seminar was co-organized by Raimund Dachselt together with Eun Kyoung Choe (University of Maryland), Petra Isenberg (INRIA Saclay), and Bongshin Lee (Microsoft Research). Among the 25 participants, also Ricardo Langner and Tom Horak from our lab followed the invitation.

As an uniqueness of Dagstuhl, the seminar run for one week in the remote location of the castle allowing for in-depth discussions about the state and future of mobile data visualizations. More specifically, different facets of the timely topic were discussed in various breakout groups, talks, and tutorials. Among others, this included the definition, evaluation methods, responsiveness, immersion, or social and ethical aspects. The results will be published soon in a Dagstuhl report. The seminar’s abstract, motivation, and list of participants is available at https://www.dagstuhl.de/19292.