Creating a successful recognizer interfacing system is dependent on several technologies. These technologies individually belong to different fields of study, however when implemented in a cooperative environment, these technologies merge to contribute towards the vision of Interface Interfacing. This chapter goes into detail about each of the technologies involved in the development of the interface interfacing framework, and gives views of related works for a deeper understanding of each. This chapter serves as the foundation of the overall technological background involved in this study and provides a brief overview of the proposed solution and how it incorporates these technologies.
2.2 “See-Through Interface” Paradigm
In our work we use the “See-Through Interface” paradigm to construct the visual interfacing environment that allows application front-end integration with recognizers through the drawing of reference zones.
The “See-Through Interface” paradigm [6] focus on interfacing tools that appear as a transparent sheet of virtual glass called “Toolglass” between an application and a traditional mouse cursor.
These interfaces provide additional views of application objects. The “See-Through” interface provides a new style of interaction that better exploits the user’s every day skills. They can be used to reduce steps, cursor motion and errors; moreover they do not require dedicated screen space since they lay on top of the application. These interfaces provide rich context-dependent feedback and the ability to view details and context simultaneously. These widgets [6] can be combined to form operation and viewing macros to simplify use. This paradigm provides mechanisms to draw grids on applications to reference zones that may need this type of guidance, such as drawing panes, or object selection screens. An application may use many views that require more than one “see through interface”, for this a managing system is presented to load the corresponding transparent interfaces of each screen, in this way shifting Toolglasses depending on the application content.
The “See-Through Interface” parading is adapted to many research areas. In [7], the authors create an immersive environment that submerges users into a virtual space, effectively transcending the boundary between the real and the virtual world. This virtual 3D world can be manipulated by the user without the need of relaying on traditional input devices such as the mouse and keyboard for interaction. This study adapts a bimanual gesture interpreter and parser that recognizes and translates the user’s arm motions to commands that invoke actions on a “Toolglass” based transparent interface that lays above this 3D environment (Figure 7). The transparent Toolglass interface paradigm is adapted as a gesture interface widget for spatially immerse environments. The user is physically surrounded by this environment as it is projected on walls of a room like structure where the user stands in the middle and uses hand gestures to move the transparent interface to the different locations of the environment to interact and view information of application objects without the need of intermediate hardware such as gloves, 3D-Mouse, or VR headgear. Actions are executed by clicking through one of those wedges, and the action is applied to the object directly behind the Toolglass.
Figure 7. The 3D Visualization and Manipulation in an Immersive Space
Another work where the “See-Through Interface” paradigm is adapted is Collaboration Transparency in the DISCIPLE Framework [8]. In this work a framework to share collaboration-transparent single-applications is developed. To share these applications, a conference agent is placed between the application’s GUI and the Windows System (Figure 8). The conference agent intercepts the user input events by adopting a special transparent Toolglass interface to intercept the events destined for the shared application window.
Figure 8. The Conference Agent Interfacing
This top-down approach intercepts all the user events (mouse, keyboard, input focus events) using a transparent GUI component without occluding the under-laying applications (Figure 9). Each time an event gets intercepted by the glass-pane, it is dispatched by the agent to the target application object. Such transparent pane is used to filter unwanted invocations to application objects in a collaborative environment when two or more users may be sharing a single application at the same time and such interaction may create conflicts.
Figure 9. Transparent Interface
Futuristic approaches such as Parsimony & Transparency in Ubiquitous Interface Design [9] focus on transparently integrating aspects of the digital world into real life artifacts, by providing ubiquitous interfaces to computation that do not obscure the highly redefined interaction modalities of the host artifact in the physical world. Coexistence of the physical and the digital worlds leads to more learnable interfaces. Here a Toolglass like interface is projected upon real life objects (Figure
10), and it is used to mark the status of the objects during time. A board game is chosen in the study as the physical environment to interface, adding features to the classic game such as game recording and automatic move clock without altering the physical environment. These interfaces, like Toolglass based ones provide different views and information about the interfaced objects attributes when interacting with them physically.
Figure 10. Interfacing the Physical World with the Digital