Techno Babble

Bill Buxton is a designer and a researcher concerned with human aspects of technology. His work reflects a particular interest in the use of technology to support creative activities such as design, film making and music. Buxton’s research specialties include technologies, techniques and theories of input to computers, technology mediated human-human collaboration, and ubiquitous computing.

Recently he has published his latest book which is well worth reading.

Here is a flyer to the book, which also contains a Table of Contents

http://www.billbuxton.com/bookFlyer.pdf

and here is a link to videos accompanying the book

http://www.mkp.com/sketching

Also, check out a conversation between John Udell and Bill Buxton at Channel 9

In the latest episode of my Microsoft Conversations series I got together with Bill Buxton to talk about the design philosophy set forth in his new book Sketching User Experiences. Nowadays Bill is a principal researcher with Microsoft Research, and before that he was chief scientist at Alias/Wavefront, but his involvement in the design of software and hardware user interfaces goes all the way back to Xerox PARC. Along the way he’s accumulated a fund of wisdom about what he calls design thinking — a way of producing, illustrating, and winnowing ideas about how products could work.

LINK: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx PostID=312067

You can find Bill Buxtons home page at:

LINK: http://www.billbuxton.com/

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ASSIST, from MIT, allows a user to sketch simple mechanical systems and see simulations of their drawings in a two-dimensional kinematic simulator.

Details of this and other projects available from Design Rationale at MIT.

Attended the presentation of a paper entitled Interactive Decal Compositing with Discrete Exponential Maps

Abstract
A method is described for texturing surfaces using decals, images placed on the surface using local parameterizations. Decal parameterizations are generated with a novel O(N logN) discrete approximation to the exponential map which requires only a single additional step in Dijkstra’s graph-distance algorithm. Decals are dynamically composited in an interface that addresses many limitations of previous work. Tools for image processing, deformation/feature-matching, and vector graphics are implemented using direct surface interaction. Exponential map decals can contain holes and can also be combined with conformal parameterization to reduce distortion. The exponential map approximation can be computed on any point set, including meshes and sampled implicit surfaces, and is relatively stable under resampling. The decals stick to the surface as it is interactively deformed, allowing the texture to be preserved even if the surface changes topology. These properties make exponential map decals a suitable approach for texturing animated implicit surfaces.

The full paper is available here

http://kf12.com/blogs/uploads/expmapsiggraph06.pdf

About the author: Ryan Michael Schmidt is currently an Master’s student in the Computer Science Department of the Unviersity of Calgary, being supervised by Dr. Brian Wyvill. He does research in computer graphics, particularly shape modeling with Implicit Surfaces and is due to commence a PhD at the University of Toronto (Summer 06)

Other Items
Possibly of equal interest were references to

ShapeShop

ShapeShop is a tool for creating 3D models using sketches. It incorporates much recent work in interactive implicit surface modeling, implicit sweep surfaces, and sketch-based modeling.

http://unknownroad.com/shapeshop/

There is a paper available ShapeShop: Sketch-Based Solid Modeling with BlobTrees which was presented at EuroGraphics 2005. Read it here

http://kf12.com/blogs/uploads/shapeshop_hires.pdf

and CrossY

CrossY is a crossing-based drawing application where instead of point-and-click “crossing” is used as an interaction method.

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/crossy/

To trigger an action a target is crossed instead of being clicked on. Additional information is available in the following paper CrossY: A Crossing-Based Drawing Application

http://kf12.com/blogs/uploads/crossy_finale.pdf

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