Toolglass ™ widgets are new user interface tools that can appear, as though on a transparent sheet of glass, between an application and a traditional cursor. They can be positioned with one hand while the other positions the cursor. The widgets provide a rich and concise vocabulary for operating on application objects. These widgets may incorporate visual filters, called Magic Lens™ filters, that modify the presentation of application objects to reveal hidden information, to enhance data of interest, or to suppress distracting information. Together, these tools form a see-through interface that offers many advantages over traditional controls. They provide a new style of interaction that better exploits the user’s everyday skills. They can reduce steps, cursor motion, and errors. Many widgets can be provided in a user interface, by designers and by users, without requiring dedicated screen space. In addition, lenses provide rich context-dependent feedback and the ability to view details and context simultaneously. Our widgets and lenses can be combined to form operation and viewing macros, and can be used over multiple applications.

Magic Lens filters are a new user interface tool that combine an arbitrarily-shaped region with an operator that changes the view of objects viewed through that region. These tools can be interactively positioned over on-screen applications much as a magnifying glass is moved over a newspaper. They can be used to help the user understand various types of information, from text documents to scientific visualizations. Because these filters are movable and apply to only part of the screen, they have a number of advantages over traditional windowwide viewing modes: they employ an attractive metaphor based on physical lenses, show a modified view in the context of the original view, limit clutter to a small region, allow easy construction of visual macros and provide a uniform paradigm that can be extended across different types of information and applications. This paper describes these advantages in more detail and illustrates them with examples of magic lens filters in use over a variety...

This article summarizes the historical development of major advances in humancomputer interaction technology, emphasizing the pivotal role of university research in the advancement of the field.

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is the study of how people design, implement, and use interactive computer systems and how computers affect individuals, organizations, and society. This encompasses not only ease of use but also new interaction techniques for supporting user tasks, providing better access to information, and creating more powerful forms of communication. It involves input and output devices and the interaction techniques that use them; how information is presented and requested; how the computer’s actions are controlled and monitored; all forms of help, documentation, and training; the tools used to design, build, test, and evaluate user interfaces; and the processes that developers follow when creating interfaces. This report describes the historical and intellectual foundations of HCI and then summarizes selected strategic directions in human-computer interaction research. Previous important reports on HCI directions include the results of the

Digital libraries have a rich information structure. In order to allow for different kinds of searches as well as for navigation along explicit and implicit links, a large variety of searching and browsing functions has to be provided. However, non-expert users will need additional help for performing effective searches. For this purpose, high-level search activities such as e.g. subject search, journal run, author search and area scan have to be supported. In order to implement these concepts, we have developed an agent-based architecture for accessing a federated digital library. The resulting system integrates searching and browsing, supports high-level search activities, allows for horizontal and vertical integration of services and is flexible and extensible.

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Croquet [11,12] is a collaborative 3D platform that allows users to work together to create and share ideas. From the beginning we have worked to ensure that the Croquet interface remain as modeless as possible. This allows the user to be most productive with the fewest errors. This is even more important in a collaborative 3D environment. The modeless nature of Croquet has allowed us a great deal of flexibility in how the user is able to both move around the environment while easily manipulating it. Certain kinds of applications, however, require some degree of intelligent pseudo-modal behavior. An example is using a CAD system to create new objects. This process forces the user into an objectcreation/modification "mode " that can take control of the interface for a short duration. E.g. we might be in the "line drawing " mode. Clearly this is not a problem, but we also need to ensure that we do not get trapped by the CAD application itself. In a sense, it should have the same degree of "mode " as drawing the line. Our approach to ensuring that Croquet remains modeless is to utilize filter portals that modify both the views of the data in the 3D space and the actions that the user makes through these filter portals. We are developing an architecture that incorporates the ideas of filters and controls for 3D to solve this problem. Our model uses the Croquet 2D portals [11] as view filters that can modify the nature of the content displayed on the other side of the filter.

Magic LensT’l filters area new user interface tool that combine an arbitrarily-shaped region with an operator that changes the view of objects viewed through that region. These tools can be interactively positioned over on-screen applications much as a magnifying glass is moved over a newspaper. They can be used to help the user understand various types of information, from text documents to scientific visualizations. Because these filters are movable and apply to only part of the screen, they have a number of advantages over traditional windowwide viewing modes: they employ an attractive metaphor based on physical lenses, show a modified view in the context of the original view, limit clutter to a small region, allow easy construction of visual macros and provide a uniform paradigm that can be extended across different types of infomlation and applications. This paper describes these advantages in more detail and illustrates them with examples of magic lens filters in use over a variety of applications.

The modern graphics processing unit (GPU) is the result of 40 years of evolution of hardware to accelerate graphics processing operations. It represents the convergence of support for multiple market segments: computer-aided design, medical imaging, digital content creation, document and presentation applications, and entertainment applications. The exceptional performance characteristics of the GPU make it an attractive target for other application domains. We examine some of this evolution, look at the structure of a modern GPU, and discuss how graphics processing exploits this structure and how nongraphical applications can take advantage of this capability. We discuss some of the technical and market issues around broader adoption of this technology.