1. Electronic Visualization Laboratory University of Illinois at Chicago
Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Ultra High Resolution Environments
Ratko Jagodic
Electronic Visualization Laboratory
University of Illinois at Chicago

2. How to enable user interaction:
The Question
How to enable user interaction:
For collocated and distributed collaboration
Using large high-resolution displays
With multiple applications rendered on remote supercomputing resources

3. Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE)
A specialized middleware for real-time streaming of extremely high-resolution graphics and high-definition video.
The streams come from remote clusters to display walls over ultra high-speed networks
Multiple applications
Scalable
Move, resize and overlap windows

4. Wall Display Interaction Capabilities
Authoring and editing
Direct interaction with remotely-rendered applications
Editing various stages of the visualization pipeline
Collaboration
Multi-user interaction
Tailor user interface to specific target sites
Persistence
Awareness and ownership
Content organization
Automatic layout
Grouping of content
Temporal organization

5. Authoring and Editing Direct Interaction Manager
Manages physical interaction devices and overlays on the wall
Basic window manipulations: move, resize, close
Direct steering of remote applications:
Move, drag, zoom, clicks
Exploring maps, flying through 3D datasets
Multiple heterogeneous devices

6. Physical Interaction Devices
The problem:
Speed vs. accuracy tradeoff
Performance up close vs. afar
Mouse
Fantastic performance
Often not appropriate
Wiimote
Fast, cheap, intuitive
Not easy to set up, imprecise
6 DOF tracked wand
Fast, intuitive
Not easy to setup, expensive
Gyromouse
Cheap, decent performance, excellent operating range
Some learning curve
Trackballs, joysticks…
Maybe a table for this???

7. Authoring and Editing SAGE Widgets
A basic widget set for building application and wall interfaces
Scalable
Distributed
Multi-user
Customizable

8. Collaboration Multi-user interaction, distributed GUIs, scalability
Sharing visualizations: Visualcasting
Uses commodity clusters to provide a scalable way to broadcast real-time ultra-high-resolution content
To scale up resolution or number of collaborators, you increase number of cluster nodes

9. Network-related interaction issues
Collaboration
Network-related interaction issues
Latency
Low latency video, audio and interaction for natural communication
Streaming quality should automatically adapt to the available bandwidth
Allocation of resources should be transparent
Fault tolerance
Network outages should result in rerouting of traffic

10. Experiences – Semester-long Class
Very useful for juxtaposing visualizations for comparison
Impractical to give everybody a Gyromouse, need a better solution
SagePointer application – allows direct wall interaction from laptop
Desktop sharing
Drag and drop of multimedia files
Content organization issues:
Need faster/easier resize
Need to be able to push windows to the back
Bring multiple windows into focus
Hiding windows

11. Content Organization More visible information
More difficult to organize
Productivity drops
Can discourage users from trying out different arrangements
Improvements:
Media Browser
Tiling modes
Bring-to-focus, minimize, push-to-back
Multi-object manipulations

12. Wall Interaction Video

13. Thank You
For more info:

14. Distributed Collaborative Visualization
Traditional approach: multicasting
Our approach: Visualcasting
Uses commodity clusters to provide a scalable way to broadcast real-time ultra-high-resolution content
To scale up resolution or number of collaborators, you increase number of cluster nodes. The visualcast management system coordinates the clusters

15. Experiences – Anatomy Study Session
Clear benefits of high res
Need different modes of interaction (desktop and direct)
Display size and relative window positions matter
Bringing multiple windows into focus
Frequent focus switching

16. Direct Interaction Manager
Manages physical interaction devices and overlays on the wall
Window manipulations:
Move, resize
Events to apps:
Move, drag, zoom, clicks

17. Wall Display User Interaction Challenges
Users cannot be tied to a desk anymore
Mouse and keyboard not appropriate anymore
Wall displays aren’t personal anymore
Multi-user interaction is imperative
Wall displays vary in size
Interfaces need to be scalable
The environment is distributed
Applications can be rendered remotely and displayed across any number of displays
They allow much more information to be displayed
Need better layout management techniques
How do we build an interaction framework that allows us to study these issues?

18. SAGE Widgets
A basic widget set for building application and wall interfaces
Scalable
Distributed
Multi-user
Customizable