Human-centered interaction with documents

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss a new user interface, a complementary environment for the work with personal document archives, i.e. for document filing and retrieval. We introduce our implementation of a spatial medium for document interaction, explorative search and active navigation, which exploits and further stimulates the human strengths of visual information processing. Our system achieves a high degree of immersion of the user, so that he/she forgets the artificiality of his/her environment. This is done by means of a tripartite ensemble of allowing users to interact naturally with gestures and postures (as an option gestures and postures can be individually taught to the system by users), exploiting 3D technology, and supporting the user to maintain structures he/she discovers, as well as provide computer calculated semantic structures. Our ongoing evaluation shows that even non-expert users can efficiently work with the information in a document collection, and have fun.